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> The key phrase here is "think deep". This tells Claude Code not to be lazy with its analysis (while spending more thinking tokens). Without it, the output was
by johnfn 1y ago
> The key phrase here is "think deep". This tells Claude Code not to be lazy with its analysis (while spending more thinking tokens). Without it, the output was very inconsistent. I used to joke that without it, Claude runs in “engineering manager mode” by delegating the work.
This section really stood out to me. I knew that asking GPT-5 to think gets better results, but I didn't know Claude had the same behavior. I'd love to see some sort of % success before and after "think deep" was added. Should I be adding "think deep" to all my non-trivial queries to Claude?
- skippyboxedhero 1y agoThere is "think" and "super think" (there may be something in the middle). If you use the word "think" at any point, this mode will also trigger...which is sometimes inconvenient. Plan mode is probably better for these situations though. Claude seems to have got much worse recently but even before, if it was stuck, then asking it so "super think" never dislodged it (presumably because AI agents have no capacity for creativity, telling them to think more is just looping harder). The loop of plan -> do is significantly more effective as most AI agents that I have used extensively will get lost on trivial tasks if you just have the "do" phase without a clear plan (some, such as GPT, also appear unable to plan effectively...we have a contract with OpenAI at work, I have no idea how people use it).
- aaviator42 1y agothink / think hard / think harder / ultrathink These are all valid claude commands/tokens to enhance its "thinking" abilities.
- calesennett 1y agoIn Anthropic's Claude Code Best Practices [1] (section 3.a.2), they note prompting with certain phrases corresponds to increasing levels of "thinking" for Claude Code: "think" < "think hard" < "think harder" < "ultrathink" [1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...
- johnfn 1y agoWow! Thanks for sharing - I didn't know this!
- lupusreal 1y agoMan this is useful, I wish I knew earlier. I should really read the documentation. Or have Claude read it for me.
- furyofantares 1y agoSince this is just a keyword, I'd expect you to prepend the entire prompt with a single line that says "think deep" or whichever think-level you want, rather than put "think deep" somewhere that makes sense in english within the prompt, as they do in the article.
- furyofantares 1y agoTo be clear I think this is an inference-level feature that looks for the string and performs inference at a higher thinking level, rather than a feature the model is trained on. Although I could be wrong, or it could be both.
- troupo 1y ago> I'd love to see some sort of % success before and after "think deep" was added. Should I be adding "think deep" to all my non-trivial queries to Claude Any such % would be meaningless because both are non-deterministic blackboxes with literally undefined behavior. Any % you'd be seeing could be just differences in available compute as the US is waking up
- johnfn 1y agoI am describing a simple eval. This is a strategy that determines how effective an AI system is, they have existed long before LLMs were ever a thing, and they are perfectly happy to deal with non-deterministic behavior. You are acting as if LLMs being non-deterministic means you can't say anything about them, but before LLMs were non-deterministic, traditional ML systems were non-deterministic, and we had no problem building systems to probabilistically evaluate them.
- troupo 1y agoA "simple eval" would give you nothing. Anthropoc running out of available compute will affect the output significantly more than a change in the model or "thinking". > we had no problem building systems to probabilistically evaluate them. Something tells me the "no problem" in that statement is from Death of Stalin when you get to the actual details of that evaluation: https://youtu.be/kasSSZlBFDs?si=-5kv7LPWi_YStR3C https://youtu.be/kasSSZlBFDs?si=-5kv7LPWi_YStR3C
- johnfn 1y agoDo you have any evidence to support your claim that "Anthropoc running out of available compute will affect the output significantly" has ever actually happened in practice? To be honest, it sounds like superstition.
- troupo 1y agoIt's called speculation, not superstition. I've already been in several situations when I'd run the same prompt over the same code with completely different results (one near genius, one near moronic). The differentiating factor? Genius was Stockholm morning, moron was Stockholm midday/afternoon.