Session notices
The message of the day and the update notice, where they come from, and how to switch them off.
Two things can appear when a session starts, above your first prompt. Both are addressed to you and neither is part of Claude's context.
The message of the day
A short line CULP's operator can publish at any time: a launch note, an incident, a change worth knowing about. It is fetched from the API, cached for thirty minutes, and printed once per session.
It is deliberately not given to Claude. A model told about an announcement acts on it, and an announcement is not an instruction.
If the API cannot be reached, the last message you were shown is used rather than silence, because a failed request is not evidence that there is nothing to say. If there has never been one, nothing is printed at all.
Set CULP_DISABLE_MOTD=1 to switch it off.
The update notice
When a newer CULP is published, the session says so and names both versions:
CULP update available: CLI 0.8.1 (you have 0.8.0). Run `culp update`, or tell
Claude to do it for you.
The plugin and the CLI carry independent versions, and a plugin-only release is the normal case, so both halves are compared. Claude is told about this one, because you were just invited to ask it to run the command.
What it will do if you ask: run culp update, which installs the CLI wheel and
synchronizes the plugin bundle. The wheel install is detached and starts only
after the current process exits, so the command reports a scheduled install
rather than a new version. culp --version in a later session is the
confirmation.
Set CULP_DISABLE_UPDATE_NOTICE=1 to switch it off.
What they cost
One culp process at session start, which the plugin was already spending on
the plan and credential check. Nothing is printed when there is nothing to say.