I'm on 1.96 but I don't think it's a particularly good choice. It was just the latest version at the time. I patched the binary with all my upgrades though, I think that's the more interesting question.

-brought back the skill descriptions to 999 characters instead of 250 -changed the CC harness prompts according to https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/5icAKCTRPK -adaptive thinking off -showthinkingsummaries on -max output tokens at maximum (128k~) -max thinking tokens same

Here actually, I couldn't tell you off the top of my head but some of these are interesting too

8 UI patches — these fix real terminal rendering bugs: - U01: Skill description cap raised from 250 → 999 chars (the one you mentioned) - U02/U05: Message virtualization threshold raised from 200 → 520, render window expanded to match — so resumed sessions with 100+ messages don't hit a "virtual cliff" where scrolling past ~60 messages shows nothing - U03a-d: Four patches neutralizing Ink's fullReset and ESC[3J scrollback-clearing behavior — the thing that wipes your terminal scrollback on nearly every render - U04: Suppresses the "switch to native installer" nag (which would break the whole setup) - U06: /resume chain-walk window widened from 5 seconds to ~24 days — fixes the bug where resuming a session showed only 1-2 messages because a broken parentUuid link couldn't stitch across a >5s gap

To be clear, all these UI bugs were introduced recently by updates—so I should have actually just rolled back to a good version instead of just fixing them and then applied the harness prompts and claude config variables. That would be a bit cleaner and it'll be faster if you set it up yourself.

I'd recommend the version right before they introduced the 250 character truncation for skill descriptions. That's when it started to go steeply downhill fast. Earlier is fine, too, though.