[e1g]

Claude Code recently downgraded the default thinking level to “medium”, so it’s worth checking your settings.

[joecool1029]

recently being within the past 24 hours lol: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1....

[darkwater]

> Re-introduced the "ultrathink" keyword to enable high effort for the next tur

Doh.

[nekitamo]

Thank you. The difference was quite noticeable today.

[wood_spirit]

Thank you thank you you give me hope :)

But how do you see the current thinking level and how do you change it? I’ve been clicking around and searching and adding “effortLevel”:”high” to .claude/settings.json but no idea if this actually has any effect etc.

[varshar]

As per Anthropic support (for Mac and Linux respectively) -

  $ echo 'export ANTHROPIC_EFFORT="high"' >> ~/.zshrc source ~/.zshrc
  $ echo 'export ANTHROPIC_EFFORT="high"' >> ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc

I prefer settings.json (VSCode) -

  "claudeCode.environmentVariables": [
    { "name": "ANTHROPIC_MODEL", "value": "claude-opus-4-6" },
    { "name": "CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL", "value": "high" }
  ], ...

[nnoremap]

Or the 2026 version: 'Hey Claude set your thinking level to high.'