I'll add a counterpoint that in many situations (especially monorepos for complex businesses), it's easy for any LLM to go down rabbit holes. Files containing the word "payment" or "onboarding" might be for entirely different DDD domains than the one relevant to the problem. As a CTO touching all sorts of surfaces, I see this problem at least once a day, entirely driven by trying to move too fast with my prompts.
And so the very first thing that the LLM does when planning, namely choosing which files to read, are a key point for manual intervention to ensure that the correct domain or business concept is being analyzed.
Speaking personally: Once I know that Claude is looking in the right place, I'm on to the next task - often an entirely different Claude session. But those critical first few seconds, to verify that it's looking in the right place, are entirely different from any other kind of verbosity.
I don't want verbose mode. I want Claude to tell me what it's reading in the first 3 seconds, so I can switch gears without fear it's going to the wrong part of the codebase. By saying that my use case requires verbose mode, you're saying that I need to see massive levels of babysitting-level output (even if less massive than before) to be able to do this.
(To lean into the babysitting analogy, I want Claude to be the babysitter, but I want to make sure the babysitter knows where I left the note before I head out the door.)
> I don't want verbose mode. I want Claude to tell me what it's reading in the first 3 seconds, so I can switch gears without fear it's going to the wrong part of the codebase. By saying that my use case requires verbose mode, you're saying that I need to see massive levels of babysitting-level output (even if less massive than before) to be able to do this.
To be clear: we re-purposed verbose mode to do exactly what you are asking for. We kept the name "verbose mode", but the behavior is what you want, without the other verbose output.
This is an interesting and complex ui decision to make.
Might it have been better to retire and/or rename the feature, if the underlying action was very different?
I work on silly basic stuff compared to Claude Code, but I find that I confuse fewer users if I rename a button instead of just changing the underlying effect.
This causes me to have to create new docs, and hopefully triggers affected users to find those docs, when they ask themselves “what happened to that button?”
Yeah, in hindsight, we probably should have renamed it.
It's not too late.
> To be clear: we re-purposed verbose mode to do exactly what you are asking for. We kept the name "verbose mode", but the behavior is what you want, without the other verbose output.
Verbose mode feels far too verbose to handle that. It’s also very hard to “keep your place” when toggling into verbose mode to see a specific output.
I think the point bcherny is making in the last few threads is that, the new verbose mode _default_ is not as verbose as it used to be and so it is not "too verbose to handle that". If you want "too verbose", that is still available behind a toggle