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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

The most frustrating part is the quality loss caused by the forced adaptive thinking. It eats 5-10% of my Max 5x usage and churns for ten minutes, only to come back with totally untrustworthy results. It lazily hand-waves issues away in order to avoid reading my actual code and doing real reasoning work on it. Opus simply cannot be trusted if adaptive thinking is enabled.

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> It lazily hand-waves issues away in order to avoid reading my actual code and doing real reasoning work on it.

It decided to leave the write endpoints added to an authentication service completely unauthenticated. The effort to do the contrary was about 6 characters, and in the claude.md. It tried to implement PKCE by embedding _everything_ in the state.

This thing is beyond untrustworthy.

The fact that they are using Claude to build Claude (not just Claude Code) probably explains a lot.

Opus 4.6 with settings and prompt fixed has been the most reliable for me. It consistently thinks things out and demonstrates good reasoning. It arrives at sound solutions that work. When perfection matters, it's very easy to refine the output with a few review passes.

You don't have to use adaptive thinking. It had been turned off on my main work computer. I was using a different computer on a trip and I started getting so angry at Claude for doing a bad job. I evetually figured out it was adaptive thinking and set it to "hard" and it started working again. At the time I think "hard" was the top choice. With 4.7, my computer now shows "xhard", which I assume is the equivelent setting. There is one higher setting than this, which I haven't tried yet. I would tell you how to change these settings, but I don't remember. By the way, I have been happy with 4.7 so far. I actually did not like 4.6 and preferred 4.5 and used that most of the time until this new release.

"With Opus 4.6, extended thinking was a toggle you managed: turn it on for hard stuff, off for quick stuff. If you left it on, every question paid the thinking tax whether it needed to or not. Now, with Opus 4.7, extended thinking becomes adaptive thinking. "

https://claude.com/resources/tutorials/working-with-claude-o...

You want extended thinking? It's not adaptive thinking and opus will turn it on if it thinks it needs to. But it probably won't, according to user reports as tokens are expensive. Except opus 4.7 now uses 35% more and outputs more thinking tokens.

I am getting pretty good performance. Even on trivial questions it seems to go through the thinking process end. If they are using adaptive thinking, it seems to work much better than before. I will see how my experience goes with more usage.

> You don't have to use adaptive thinking.

With Opus 4.7 you absolutely do. Users don't have a choice.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/model-config

> Opus 4.7 always uses adaptive reasoning. The fixed thinking budget mode and CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING do not apply to it.

/effort

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