What is the thinking budget?

Status Fixed / completed
Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — igorkofman
Activity 10 comments · opened Mar 6, 2025 · closed Mar 17, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (igorkofman, collaborator) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

The documentation hints that you should ask Claude when extra thinking is required, i.e.: "think hard about how to solve X". Is there a way to get any indication that this is working, see Claude's thoughts, or adjust the token budget manually (to 64k)?

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10 Comments

igorkofman collaborator · 1 year ago

Not the the moment but "think harder" will get you 32k. We are experimenting with better ways to control this.

bcherny collaborator · 1 year ago

You should see Claude's thoughts when you ask it to "think". If you're not seeing "Thinking..." let us know!

sagarspatil · 1 year ago
You should see Claude's thoughts when you ask it to "think". If you're not seeing "Thinking..." let us know!

Any plan to actually stream the thinking tokens?

zakkor · 1 year ago
You should see Claude's thoughts when you ask it to "think". If you're not seeing "Thinking..." let us know!

Do you mean the "Clauding..." phrases? If so, then no, that doesn't map to thinking. That phase also includes writing the search/replace file edits, so you can't really know when it's thinking or when it's writing diffs

igorkofman collaborator · 1 year ago

We found the issue - this should work better in the next release (Monday) and yes, you'll be able to see the thinking tokens, not just a status message. Thanks for the report!

rdvo · 1 year ago

is it the normal thinking or does it use the -thinking- 3.7 model?

igorkofman collaborator · 1 year ago

It uses 3.7 thinking and you should now be able to see the full chain of throught in the latest build (try "think" or "think harder" as part of your prompt to control how much thinking claude does).

Please let us know how it feels!

igorkofman collaborator · 1 year ago

Starting tomorrow, you can also use the MAX_THINKING_TOKENS environment variable to control the maximum thinking budget.

zakkor · 1 year ago

Nice! Getting this error though:

$ MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=64000 claude
╭────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ ✻ Welcome to Claude Code research preview! │
│                                            │
│   /help for help                           │
│                                            │
│   cwd: ...         │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────╯

> what's 2+2?
  ⎿ API Error: 400

MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=63999 seems to work though.

github-actions[bot] · 1 year ago

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