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simonwtoday at 3:31 PM17 repliesview on HN

I'm finding the "adaptive thinking" thing very confusing, especially having written code against the previous thinking budget / thinking effort / etc modes: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/adapti...

Also notable: 4.7 now defaults to NOT including a human-readable reasoning token summary in the output, you have to add "display": "summarized" to get that: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/adapti...

(Still trying to get a decent pelican out of this one but the new thinking stuff is tripping me up.)


Replies

JamesSwifttoday at 5:29 PM

Its especially concerning / frustrating because boris’s reply to my bug report on opus being dumber was “we think adaptive thinking isnt working” and then thats the last I heard of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668520

Now disabling adaptive thinking plus increasing effort seem to be what has gotten me back to baseline performance but “our internal evals look good“ is not good enough right now for what many others have corroborated seeing

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avaertoday at 4:04 PM

> Still trying to get a decent pelican out of this one but the new thinking stuff is tripping me up

Wouldn't that be p-hacking where p stands for pelican?

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shawnztoday at 5:27 PM

Note that for Claude Code, it looks like they added a new undocumented command line argument `--thinking-display summarized` to control this parameter, and that's the only way to get thinking summaries back there.

VS Code users can write a wrapper script which contains `exec "$@" --thinking-display summarized` and set that as their claudeCode.claudeProcessWrapper in VS Code settings in order to get thinking summaries back.

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puppystenchtoday at 4:27 PM

Does this mean Claude no longer outputs the full raw reasoning, only summaries? At one point, exposing the LLM's full CoT was considered a core safety tenet.

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p_stuart82today at 4:26 PM

yeah they took "i pick the budget" and turned it into "trust us".

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dgb23today at 4:19 PM

Don't look at "thinking" tokens. LLMs sometimes produce thinking tokens that are only vaguely related to the task if at all, then do the correct thing anyways.

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lukantoday at 4:17 PM

"Also notable: 4.7 now defaults to NOT including a human-readable reasoning token summary in the output, you have to add "display": "summarized" to get that"

I did not follow all of this, but wasn't there something about, that those reasoning tokens did not represent internal reasoning, but rather a rough approximation that can be rather misleading, what the model actual does?

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markrogersjrtoday at 5:42 PM

CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING=1 claude…

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maximgrantoday at 6:54 PM

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-agent-sdk-python/pull/8... - created PR for that cause hit it in their python sdk

nextaccountictoday at 7:31 PM

If you do include reasoning tokens you pay more, right?

simonwtoday at 5:45 PM

... here's the pelican, I think Qwen3.6-35B-A3B running locally did a better job! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/16/qwen-beats-opus/

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cyanydeeztoday at 5:07 PM

It's likely hiding the model downgrade path they require to meet sustainable revenue. Should be interesting if they can enshittify slowly enough to avoid the ablative loss of customers! Good luck all VCs!

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haellsightoday at 4:14 PM

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