A teammate tells you a Claude Code feature you both read about is missing for them. It works on your machine. What is worth checking first?

The principle — when one machine has a feature and another does not, suspect the version before the feature.

Why the key is correct — Anthropic documents two different behaviours for two different routes. Native installations automatically update in the background to keep you on the latest version, while Homebrew installations do not auto-update and have to be upgraded by hand. A teammate on the second kind can sit several releases behind indefinitely, which looks exactly like a missing feature. Asking how they installed it separates those two explanations in one question.

Why the others are wrong — waiting for an error will not help, because an older build is not a broken one; it runs fine and simply lacks the newer capability. Assuming every install self-updates is the belief that produces the confusion in the first place. And there is no auto-update toggle to inspect, because the behaviour is a property of the install route rather than of configuration.

Remember this — "which install?" is a faster first question than "which feature?".

Sources — Anthropic's Claude Code overview.