Anthropic announced on November 4 that background subagents in Claude Code now take a smaller bite out of usage limits. A running subagent updates its status line every 30 seconds, and each update used to re-read that subagent's whole conversation; now Haiku 5.5 writes the line from condensed notes, so each update costs about 99% less. In a reply to the same post, ClaudeDevs added that the subagent keeps running on its own model, sessions with background subagents used about 5% less of the limit, and for the same quota users get roughly 6% more prompts. The change is live for most Pro, Max and Ultra users and for all Team and Enterprise accounts, from version 2.1.316 onward. Lydia Hallie, who handles developer relations on the team, clarified in the thread that the change only affects the CLI, since the desktop app doesn't write this status line at all.