Claude Code status summaries for background agents can eat into token budgets

A gist from Flamerix AI says that about every 30 seconds, Claude Code sends each background agent's full transcript back to that agent's model just to write a 3 to 5 word status line in the agents panel. In their own telemetry over one week, these agent_summary calls were 16.4% of Claude Code spend and 19.7% of API requests. They say it has been on by default since version 2.1.232 in August 2026, has no setting that turns off only this, and they share an unofficial workaround script that an update can silently break. On Hacker News (224 comments), a commenter who says they work on Claude Code replied that only actively working background agents get these calls, that across users who send telemetry they were about 2% of cost and just under 4% of requests last week (about 6% of cost in the terminal), and that a fix for the most expensive case shipped in 2.1.311+ with a cheaper mode in progress. Of 49 top-level comments, 3 suggest prompt caching keeps the cost low, while at least 15 blame Claude Code's bloat or the incentives of a model maker building its own tool. No consensus on how big the cost is for a typical user.