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

joecool1029 · 2026-03-05T06:59:03 1772693943

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

darkwater · 2026-03-05T07:46:46 1772696806

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

Doh.

nekitamo · 2026-03-04T23:02:51 1772665371

Thank you. The difference was quite noticeable today.

wood_spirit · 2026-03-05T06:41:08 1772692868

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 · 2026-03-05T08:51:20 1772700680

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 · 2026-03-05T14:12:33 1772719953

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