Claude Code v2.1.296 Just Halved Every Agent Bill

Anthropic shipped Claude Code v2.1.296 yesterday and quietly halved the Sonnet 5.5 cache read price - the single biggest line on any agent bill that re-reads your codebase daily. Playbooks + my answers, free - Church of SEO Jesus: https://www.skool.com/church-of-seo-j... What you get in 7 minutes: The one env var (CLAUDE_CODE_WORKFLOW_SUBAGENT_MODEL) to send your developer today Why Sonnet 5.5 cache reads dropping from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens cuts your weekly agent invoice roughly in half The two Windows fixes that stopped silent file corruption on Shift-JIS, GBK and Windows-1252 codebases The PowerShell allow-rule ceiling jumping 32x (from ~1 KB to 32 KB) The MCP tool description cap doubling to 4,096 characters Sources: Claude Code v2.1.296 release notes: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-... Anthropic pricing: https://www.anthropic.com/pricing Chapters below. Chapters: 00:00 Claude Code v2.1.296 shipped yesterday 00:22 Operator take on v2.1.296 00:45 Sonnet 5.5 cache reads halved to $0.10/M 01:18 Who actually hits the cache 01:45 CLAUDE_CODE_WORKFLOW_SUBAGENT_MODEL explained 02:21 Subscribe + Free Church ask 02:52 Terminal demo on the release notes 03:55 Windows PowerShell 32 KB fix 04:25 Edit tool refuses Shift-JIS and GBK files 05:01 allow_large, autoCompactWindow, 4,096 MCP cap 05:45 Who gets undercut this week 06:05 Church of SEO Jesus playbook 06:30 One action in the next ten minutes 06:56 Haiku vs Opus bill benchmark #claudecode #anthropic #aiagents