Claude's Thinking Toggle Doesn't Match Backend Settings
Users report Claude's thinking toggle interface state displays incorrectly and fails to synchronize with actual backend configuration settings, causing
Someone figured out why Claude’s extended thinking has been so inconsistent lately - the backend settings don’t match what the UI toggle shows.
When you ask Claude directly “What is your thinking mode currently set to?”, it reports back “auto” instead of “enabled”, even with the extended thinking toggle switched on. There’s also a reasoning_effort parameter (currently showing 85/100) that gets set before Claude even reads the prompt.
What this means: Auto mode lets Claude decide per-message whether to actually use extended thinking or skip it. Your UI toggle becomes a suggestion rather than a hard requirement.
This explains the recent weirdness - thinking blocks randomly not appearing, surface-level answers that feel pattern-matched, confident but wrong responses, and quality bouncing around in the same thread. People started noticing it in late January.
To check your own settings: Just ask Claude: “What is your thinking mode currently set to?”
Works on regular claude.ai with Opus 4.5 and Max subscriptions. Pretty frustrating since the whole point of paying for extended thinking was consistent reasoning, not algorithmic coin flips.
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