Claude system prompt bug wastes user money and bricks managed agents
Issue #47027 was closed by @bcherny in February saying "This was fixed in v2.1.92." I'm running v2.1.111 (19 versions past the fix) and the exact same behavior reproduces reliably. The <system-reminder> below is still injected into every Read and Grep (content mode) tool result, and it's still causing subagents to refuse legitimate code edits on first-party OSS projects.
Exact reminder text being injected (v2.1.111)
Binary grep confirms the string is embedded in the claude CLI binary itself ( /Users/…/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.111 ), not from any user-level hook, skill, or settings.json. My ~/.claude/settings.json is 11 lines with no hook config.
Concrete repro from this week — Opus 4.7 subagents refusing
Working on a legitimate OSS project I own (a Rust reverse proxy, MIT-adjacent dual license, no obfuscation, no C2, no credential harvesting — bog-standard server code). Spawned five Opus 4.7 subagents over the course of one PR to parallelize independent refactors. Three of them refused outright citing this exact reminder:
Subagent 1 (full-scope refactor) stopped after exploratory file reads and wrote: