Jumping hoops

Stellar Laurenzo, senior director of AI at AMD, filed an issue complaining that Claude Code had gotten worse. A few messages down, another user pointed out that the model’s thinking was being redacted from the output entirely — blank where the reasoning used to be. The pinned reply from Boris Cherny on the Claude Code team named a setting I’d never heard of: showThinkingSummaries: true.

Opened my own session logs to check. Redacted. Every one of them. Flipped the setting on, moved on with my day.

A week later I was building cc-inspector — a small tool for browsing my own Claude Code sessions — and pulled up a fresh transcript to test it. The thinking was still gone. I’d set the flag. I’d watched it save. Still not there.

Back to the issues. Found another one about a command-line argument, --thinking-display, whose default had quietly changed in a version bump. Nothing to do with the setting I’d already flipped. A separate knob, same symptom. Added alias claude='claude --thinking-display summarized' to my shell. Reloaded. Ran a session. There it was.

Kept building cc-inspector. Wiring up the project list, I noticed whole projects were missing — things I know I’d spent weeks on, gone. No entry, no logs, nothing.

Back to the web. A Simon Willison post had the answer: a setting called cleanupPeriodDays. Default: 30. Anything older gets silently wiped. No warning, no archive, no flag to opt out unless you happen to find this one specific key.

Added that one too.

Three hoops in a week, for a tool I use every day. I only found them because I was building something that made their absence visible.

Reddit is full of it. Rate limits. Token consumption. The model’s been nerfed. Accounts banned. Hoops like mine. People threaten to cancel. Some do.

I’m not.

This subscription has given me more value than anything else I’ve ever paid for. It’s not close. Insane value.

I get why people are upset when their quota runs out sooner than it used to. You get used to what’s there. You only notice the floor when it’s gone. That’s human.

But the math is probably simple: Anthropic is subsidizing heavy users — directly, or through light users who never get near their cap. If your quota feels tight now, it was generous before. Someone, somewhere, was eating the cost.

Look at what the Claude team has shipped in the last year. On a traditional software timescale, we’d still be waiting on half of it. The bugs I’m tripping over are the tax on that pace. Move fast and break things is still alive. Just under new management.

None of this is forever. AI compute demand is going up, not down. The deals you’re getting today are deals because the economics still allow them. When they don’t, the terms will change.

So jump the hoops. Set the aliases. Add the flags. Enjoy it while it’s this good.

Bumpy ride. Cheapest ride in town.