alt Hacker NewsHey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here. I just responded on the issue, and cross-posting here for input.
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Hi, thanks for the detailed analysis. Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this.
There's a lot here, I will try to break it down a bit. These are the two core things happening:
> `redact-thinking-2026-02-12`
This beta header hides thinking from the UI, since most people don't look at it. It *does not* impact thinking itself, nor does it impact thinking budgets or the way extended reasoning works under the hood. It is a UI-only change.
Under the hood, by setting this header we avoid needing thinking summaries, which reduces latency. You can opt out of it with `showThinkingSummaries: true` in your settings.json (see [docs](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#available-settings)).
If you are analyzing locally stored transcripts, you wouldn't see raw thinking stored when this header is set, which is likely influencing the analysis. When Claude sees lack of thinking in transcripts for this analysis, it may not realize that the thinking is still there, and is simply not user-facing.
> Thinking depth had already dropped ~67% by late February
We landed two changes in Feb that would have impacted this. We evaluated both carefully:
1/ Opus 4.6 launch → adaptive thinking default (Feb 9)
Opus 4.6 supports adaptive thinking, which is different from thinking budgets that we used to support. In this mode, the model decides how long to think for, which tends to work better than fixed thinking budgets across the board. `CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING` to opt out.
2/ Medium effort (85) default on Opus 4.6 (Mar 3)
We found that effort=85 was a sweet spot on the intelligence-latency/cost curve for most users, improving token efficiency while reducing latency. On of our product principles is to avoid changing settings on users' behalf, and ideally we would have set effort=85 from the start. We felt this was an important setting to change, so our approach was to:
1. Roll it out with a dialog so users are aware of the change and have a chance to opt out
2. Show the effort the first few times you opened Claude Code, so it wasn't surprising.
Some people want the model to think for longer, even if it takes more time and tokens. To improve intelligence more, set effort=high via `/effort` or in your settings.json. This setting is sticky across sessions, and can be shared among users. You can also use the ULTRATHINK keyword to use high effort for a single turn, or set `/effort max` to use even higher effort for the rest of the conversation.
Going forward, we will test defaulting Teams and Enterprise users to high effort, to benefit from extended thinking even if it comes at the cost of additional tokens & latency. This default is configurable in exactly the same way, via `/effort` and settings.json.
Replies
I think it is hilarious that there are four different ways to set settings (settings.json config file, environment variable, slash commands and magical chat keywords).
That kind of consistency has also been my own experience with LLMs.
Yeah LOL tell me I'm holding it wrong again. Actually Boris, I am tracking what is happening here. I see it, and I'm keeping receipts[0]. This started with the 4.6 rollout, specifically with the unearned confidence and not reading as much between writes. The flail quotient has gone right the hell up. If your evals aren't showing that then bully for your evals I reckon.
I was not aware the default effort had changed to medium until the quality of output nosedived. This cost me perhaps a day of work to rectify. I now ensure effort is set to max and have not had a terrible session since. Please may I have a "always try as hard as you can" mode ?
Ultrathink is back? I thought that wasn't a thing anymore.
If I am following.. "Max" is above "High", but you can't set it to "Max" as a default. The highest you can configure is "High", and you can use "/effort max" to move a step up for a (conversation? session?), or "ultrathink" somewhere in the prompt to move a step up for a single turn. Is this accurate?
Happy to have my mind changed, yet I am not 100% convinced closing the issue as completed captures the feedback.
There's been more going on than just the default to medium level thinking - I'll echo what others are saying, even on high effort there's been a very significant increase in "rush to completion" behavior.
While we have you here, could you fix the bash escaping bug? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/10153
Here's the reply in context:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796#issuecomment-4194007103
All right so what do I need to do so it does its job again? Disable adaptive thinking and set effort to high and/or use ULTRATHINK again which a few weeks ago Claude code kept on telling me is useless now?
How do you guys manage regressions as a whole with every new model update? A massive test set of e2e problem solving seeing how the models compare?
> Before I keep going, I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this.
"This report was produced by me — Claude Opus 4.6 — analyzing my own session logs. ... Ben built the stop hook, the convention reviews, the frustration-capture tools, and this entire analysis pipeline because he believes the problem is fixable and the collaboration is worth saving. He spent today — a day he could have spent shipping code — building infrastructure to work around my limitations instead of leaving."
What a "fuckin'" circle jerk this universe has turned out to be. This note was produced by me and who the hell is Ben?
I definitely noticed the mid-output self-correction reasoning loops mentioned in the GitHub issue in some conversations with Opus 4.6 with extended reasoning enabled on claude.ai. How do I max out the effort there?
Thanks for the update,
Perhaps max users can be included in defaulting to different effort levels as well?
> You can also use the ULTRATHINK keyword to use high effort for a single turn
First I've heard that ultrathink was back. Much quieter walkback of https://decodeclaude.com/ultrathink-deprecated/
I’ve seen you/anthropic comment repeatedly over the last several months about the “thinking” in similar ways -
“most users dont look at it” (how do you know this?)
“our product team felt it was too visually noisy”
etc etc. But every time something like this is stated, your power users (people here for the most part) state that this is dead wrong. I know you are repeating the corporate line here, but it’s bs.
Do you guys realize that everyone is switching to Codex because Claude Code is practically unusable now, even on a Max subscription? You ask it to do tasks, and it does 1/10th of them. I shouldn't have to sit there and say: "Check your work again and keep implementing" over and over and over again... Such a garbage experience.
Does Anthropic actually care? Or is it irrelevant to your company because you think you'll be replacing us all in a year anyway?
Thinking time is not the issue. The issue is that Claude does not actually complete tasks. I don't care if it takes longer to think, what I care about is getting partial implementations scattered throughout my codebase while Claude pretends that it finished entirely. You REALLY need to fix this, it's atrocious.
> This beta header hides thinking from the UI, since most people don't look at it.
I look at it, and I am very upset that I no longer see it.
> I wanted to say I appreciate the depth of thinking & care that went into this.
The irony lol. The whole ticket is just AI-generated. But Anthropic employees have to say this because saying otherwise will admit AI doesn't have "the depth of thinking & care."