Claude Code developer acknowledges adaptive thinking flaw, provides workaround
Boris Charny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, publicly engaged with developers on Hacker News about performance issues reported since February. Initially attributing problems to user settings, he shifted his position after examining bug transcripts.
Initial position: Settings issue
Charny's first explanation pointed to two intentional changes: hiding the thinking process (a UI change) and lowering the default effort level. The implicit message was that performance hadn't degraded - users were just experiencing the new, lower-cost default. He suggested changing settings back to /effort high for previous performance levels.
Shift to acknowledgment
When confronted with evidence from users already using the highest effort settings and still experiencing problems, Charny analyzed bug reports and moved from general settings explanations to specific technical diagnosis.
Final position: Specific flaw identified
Charny explicitly validated users' experiences, conceding that the "adaptive thinking" feature is "under-allocating reasoning." He confirmed this wasn't related to effort defaults, as telemetry showed affected sessions were sending effort=high on every request.
His final message stated: "The data points at adaptive thinking under-allocating reasoning on certain turns — the specific turns where it fabricated (stripe API version, git SHA suffix, apt package list) had zero reasoning emitted, while the turns with deep reasoning were correct."
Workaround and investigation
Charny provided an interim workaround: CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING=1 forces a fixed reasoning budget instead of letting the model decide per-turn. He noted the model team is investigating the issue.
The discussion demonstrates direct engagement between Anthropic technical staff and external developers, with transparency about technical issues affecting Claude Code's performance.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
👀 See Also
Anthropic Moves Claude Code Background Automation to Separate SDK Credit Bucket, Breaking Agent Workflows
Starting June 15, claude -p, Agent SDK usage, Claude Code GitHub Actions, and third-party Agent SDK apps stop counting against Pro/Max interactive quotas. A new separate Agent SDK credit bucket applies: $100/month for Max 5x plans. Background agent stacks (e.g., tickets → agents → hooks → executor → claude -p) will burn through this fast.
Stop Letting AI Agents Design Your Architecture
AI agents like Claude are pathologically agreeable, producing plausible but context-free architectures. They can't say no, don't know your team's constraints, and turn senior engineers into ticket implementers.
Qwen 3 8B outperforms larger models in blind peer evaluations on hard tasks
In a blind peer evaluation of 10 small language models on 13 hard frontier-level tasks, Qwen 3 8B won 6 evaluations and placed in the top 3 in 12 of 13 tasks, outperforming models with up to 4x its parameter count. The evaluation covered distributed lock debugging, Go concurrency bugs, SQL optimization, Bayesian medical diagnosis, Simpson's Paradox, Arrow's voting theorem, and survivorship bias analysis.
OpenRouter Confirms Hunter/Healer Alpha Models as MiMo V2 Variants
OpenRouter's previously stealth Hunter Alpha and Healer Alpha models have been confirmed as MiMo V2 variants. Hunter Alpha is the MiMo V2 Pro text-only reasoning model with 1M context window, while Healer Alpha is the MiMo V2 Omni text+image reasoning model with 262K context window.