Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates | Hacker News

A beta header now hides "thinking" from the UI but is a UI-only change and does not alter thinking itself or thinking budgets.

You can opt out of the header by setting showThinkingSummaries: true in settings.json.

Locally stored transcripts may omit raw thinking when the header is enabled; Claude may not recognize that thinking is still present.

Thinking depth dropped by about 67% by late February after two February changes: Opus 4.6's adaptive thinking and the default Medium effort (85).

You can opt out of adaptive thinking with CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING; effort=85 is the sticky default and can be changed via /effort or settings.json. Product rollout included a dialog and first-time notices.