Claude Code 2.1.128 Loads Plugins From .zip Archives and Stops Dropping Unpushed Commits

Claude Code v2.1.128 landed on May 4, 2026 with three changes that quietly fix workflow problems many of us hit without realising it: plugins can now be loaded straight from a .zip, EnterWorktree finally branches from local HEAD instead of origin/<default>, and subprocesses no longer inherit the CLI’s own OTEL_* environment variables. None of these are flashy, all of them remove a class of “wait, why did that just happen?” support thread.

--plugin-dir now accepts zipped plugin archives

Until v2.1.128, --plugin-dir only accepted a directory. If you wanted to share an internal plugin with a colleague or pin a version, you either pushed it to a marketplace, committed the unpacked tree into the repo, or wrote a wrapper script that unzipped before launching. None of that scaled past one or two plugins.

The new behaviour is exactly what you expect:

# Old: had to point at an unpacked directory
claude --plugin-dir ./plugins/my-team-tooling

# New in v2.1.128: zip works directly
claude --plugin-dir ./plugins/my-team-tooling-1.4.0.zip

# Mix and match in the same launch
claude \
  --plugin-dir ./plugins/local-dev \
  --plugin-dir ./dist/release-bundle.zip

There’s also a fix in this release that pairs with it. The /plugin Components panel used to show “Marketplace ‘inline’ not found” for plugins loaded via --plugin-dir. v2.1.128 stops that. And the headless mode init.plugin_errors JSON now reports --plugin-dir load failures (corrupt zip, missing manifest) alongside the existing dependency demotion errors, so CI scripts can fail loudly instead of silently shipping a broken plugin set.

EnterWorktree no longer drops your unpushed commits

This one is a real bug fix dressed up as a behaviour change. EnterWorktree is the tool Claude Code uses to spin up an isolated worktree for an agent task. Before this release, the new branch was created from origin/<default-branch>, which sounds reasonable until you realise what it means: any commit you had locally on main but hadn’t pushed yet was simply not part of the worktree the agent saw.

In v2.1.128, EnterWorktree creates the branch from local HEAD, which is what the docs already claimed. Concretely:

# You're on main with a local-only commit
git log --oneline -2
# a1b2c3d feat: WIP rate limiter (NOT pushed)
# 9876543 chore: bump deps (origin/main)

# Agent calls EnterWorktree
# v2.1.126 and earlier: branch starts at 9876543, your WIP commit is GONE
# v2.1.128: branch starts at a1b2c3d, the agent sees your WIP

If you’ve ever had a long-running agent task quietly skip the change you made five minutes ago, this is probably why.

OTEL env vars no longer leak into subprocesses

Claude Code itself is OpenTelemetry-instrumented and reads OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT, OTEL_SERVICE_NAME, and friends from the environment. Until v2.1.128 those variables were inherited by every subprocess the CLI spawned: Bash tool calls, hooks, MCP servers, LSP processes. If you ran a .NET app via the Bash tool that was itself OTel-instrumented, it would happily push its traces to the CLI’s collector.

The fix in v2.1.128 strips OTEL_* out of the environment before exec. Your apps now use the OTLP endpoint they were configured with, not the one your editor happens to be reporting to. If you genuinely want a child process to share the CLI’s collector, set the variable explicitly in your run script.

A few other notable items: bare /color now picks a random session color, /mcp shows the tool count per server and flags ones that connected with zero tools, parallel shell tool calls no longer cancel sibling calls when one read-only command (grep, git diff) fails, and sub-agent progress summaries finally hit the prompt cache for roughly 3x lower cache_creation cost on busy multi-agent runs. Vim mode also got a small but correct fix: Space in NORMAL mode moves the cursor right, matching real vi.

This continues the trend the v2.1.126 project purge release started: small, targeted CLI changes that take blunt instruments out of the user’s hands. Full notes on the v2.1.128 release page.