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Comment by bcherny | Hacker News Reader

> I don't want verbose mode. I want Claude to tell me what it's reading in the first 3 seconds, so I can switch gears without fear it's going to the wrong part of the codebase. By saying that my use case requires verbose mode, you're saying that I need to see massive levels of babysitting-level output (even if less massive than before) to be able to do this.

To be clear: we re-purposed verbose mode to do exactly what you are asking for. We kept the name "verbose mode", but the behavior is what you want, without the other verbose output.

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This is an interesting and complex ui decision to make.

Might it have been better to retire and/or rename the feature, if the underlying action was very different?

I work on silly basic stuff compared to Claude Code, but I find that I confuse fewer users if I rename a button instead of just changing the underlying effect.

This causes me to have to create new docs, and hopefully triggers affected users to find those docs, when they ask themselves “what happened to that button?”

Yeah, in hindsight, we probably should have renamed it.

It's not too late.

This verbose mode discussion has gotten quite verbose lol

You can call it “output granularity” and allow Java logger style configuration, e.g. allowing certain operations to be very verbose while others being simply aggregated

If we're going there, we need to make the logging dynamically configurable with Log4J-style JNDI and LDAP. It's entirely secure as history has shown - and no matter what, it'll still be more secure than installing OpenClaw!

(Kidding aside, logging complexity is a slippery slope, and I think it's important, perhaps even at a societal level, for an organization like Anthropic to default to a posture that allows people to feel they have visibility into where their agentic workflows are getting their context from. To the extent that "___ puts you in control" becomes important as rogue agentic behavior is increasingly publicized, it's in keeping with, and arguably critical to, Claude's brand messaging.)

They don’t have to reproduce it literally. It’s an UX problem with many solutions. My point is, you cannot settle on some „average“ solution here. It’s likely that some agents, some operations will be more trustworthy, some less, but that will be highly dependent on context of the execution.

Feels like you aren’t really listening to the feedback. Is verbose mode the same as the explicit callouts of files read in the previous versions? Yes, you intended it to fulfill the same need, but, take a step back. Is it the same? I’m hearing a resounding “no”. At the very least if you hace made such a big change, you’ve gotten rid of the value of a true “verbose mode”.

> To be clear: we re-purposed verbose mode to do exactly what you are asking for. We kept the name "verbose mode", but the behavior is what you want, without the other verbose output.

Verbose mode feels far too verbose to handle that. It’s also very hard to “keep your place” when toggling into verbose mode to see a specific output.

I think the point bcherny is making in the last few threads is that, the new verbose mode _default_ is not as verbose as it used to be and so it is not "too verbose to handle that". If you want "too verbose", that is still available behind a toggle

Yeah, I didn't realize that there's a new sort of verbose mode now which is different than the verbose mode that was included previously. Although I'm still not clear on the difference between "verbose mode" and "ctrl + o". Based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982177 I think they are different (specifically where they say "while hiding more details behind ctrl+o".

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