Set MAX_THINKING_TOKENS to 0, Claude's thinking hardly does anything and just wastes tokens. It actually often performs worse than without thinking.
So we are seeing 1. some sort of model degredation is my guess (why it can't break a thinking loop on some problems), as well as 2. a clear drop in thinking token UI transparency
when i left it running overnight it finally sent a message saying it exceeded the 64000 output token limit