Claude Code tests /init interview flow with CLAUDE_CODE_NEW_INIT=1

• Anthropic is testing a new Claude Code /init flow that "should interview you" before setting up repo configuration, and the test is gated behind the CLAUDE_CODE_NEW_INIT=1 flag in Claude Code new /init test.
• According to Anthropic's thread details, the command works in "a new or existing repo" and can scaffold Claude Code pieces including Claude.md, hooks, and skills.
• The test appears driven by user requests rather than a silent rollout: Anthropic says the new flow was "based on your feedback" and informed by "a ton of customer feedback" feedback note customer feedback.
• Early practitioner discussion suggests setup may still vary by surface: Simon Willison flagged that skills added in Claude chat do not appear to carry over to Claude Code for web, while other users report default web skills can be hard to override surface mismatch default skill issue.

Anthropic is turning /init from a basic setup command into an interactive onboarding step. In the test build, /init "should interview you and help setup skills, hooks, etc," which is a concrete shift from static config generation toward guided repo-specific setup new /init test.

The activation path is explicit: launch Claude Code with the environment flag, then run /init inside the target repository. Anthropic's thread details say the command can initialize both fresh and existing repos and set up Claude.md, hooks, and skills, which makes this more of a configuration bootstrapper than a one-off wizard.

Anthropic is framing this as a live test driven by real operator pain points, not a finished launch. The original announcement says the new flow is "based on your feedback," and a follow-up adds that it was informed by "a ton of customer feedback" feedback note customer feedback.

That matters for engineers because /init sits at the boundary between ad hoc prompting and repeatable repo configuration. If the interview flow reliably writes the same Claude.md, hooks, and skills setup Anthropic describes in the thread details, it could reduce the manual glue work teams currently do when standardizing agent behavior across repositories.

The immediate caveat is that skills behavior still looks inconsistent across Claude surfaces. Simon Willison said Claude chat now has an "add to skills" mechanism, but "Claude Code for web does not" as far as he could tell; he surfaced that while experimenting with Starlette 1.0 and Claude skills Starlette skills post Starlette write-up.

A separate practitioner report points to another control problem in the web product: Ethan Mollick asked whether the frontend design skill could be turned off, saying some default Anthropic skills appear to be "always available," which can make it harder to get custom skills selected for overlapping tasks default skill issue. His later follow-up offered no workaround beyond "apparently not" no toggle found. Together, those reports suggest the new /init setup may help teams author skills faster, but not yet guarantee uniform skills behavior across chat, web, and code surfaces.