[FEATURE] Add Option to Always Show Claude's Thinking

[yannbam]

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Since v2.0.0 thinking is no longer shown in verbose mode. I work on steering and improving Claude's thinking. Now I have to press ctrl-o, ctrl-e, and scroll up all the time to see the thinking content, which is tedious.

Proposed Solution

Add a config option to always show thinking, like in verbose mode pre v2.0

Alternative Solutions

No response

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Interactive mode (TUI)

Use Case Example

No response

Additional Context

No response

[github-actions[bot]]

Found 2 possible duplicate issues:

1. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8371
2. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8453

This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.

• If your issue is a duplicate, please close it and 👍 the existing issue instead
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🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[Emasoft]

Yes! I really can’t work without being able to follow the model train of thought! 🙏

[damsolanke]

Please prioritize this!!!

[trb]

To further provide a use case - I've had multiple instances where I needed to correct Claude Code's usage of internal libraries and I only found out because I checked the thought process with Ctrl+O.

The thinking tokens are so important in order to see if Claude Code is following instructions, it's a surprisingly ill-informed decision to hide them by default (and make them only accessible with the non-updating verbose mode), given that otherwise Claude Codes development has been pretty in-line with my use of it.

I agree with Emasoft, Claude Code is nearly unusable to me without having to check verbose mode all the time.

[davidjson]

You can downgrade via npm i -g @anthropic-ai/[email protected] to display thinking if you don't rely on the new features.

[RokaCreativa]

Plase## Critical Use Case: Real-time Code Review

I need to see Claude's thinking blocks in real-time to catch errors before they happen, not after.

My Workflow (that v2.0 broke):

1. I ask Claude to implement something
2. I watch the thinking blocks as they appear
3. If I see Claude going in the wrong direction → I stop it immediately
4. This saves me hours of debugging bad implementations

Why Ctrl+O, Ctrl+E doesn't work:

• It's post-mortem debugging - I can only see thinking AFTER Claude finishes
• By then, the wrong code is already written
• I lose the ability to course-correct in real-time

The Value:

"Seeing Claude think is like pair programming with visibility into your partner's reasoning. Without it, it's like coding with someone who won't tell you their plan until after they've written everything."

What I Need:

A simple setting in ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "alwaysShowThinking": true
}

Or an environment variable:
CLAUDE_CODE_ALWAYS_SHOW_THINKING=true

Priority:

This isn't a "nice to have" - it's the difference between:
- ✅ Proactive collaboration (v1.0.128)
- ❌ Reactive debugging (v2.0+)

Please bring back the ability to see thinking blocks in real-time. The community is clearly asking for this.

---
Temporary workaround for others: Downgrade to npm i -g @anthropic-ai/[email protected] but this means losing all v2.0+ improvements.

[ericksonc]

I'm concerned about the trajectory here. Looking at industry patterns:

• OpenAI never exposes reasoning tokens
• Gemini moved from raw thinking to "summaries"
• Claude shows full thinking in web UI but obscures it via API
• Now Claude Code v2.0 makes thinking harder to access

For power users working on prompt engineering, debugging, and understanding AI behavior, visibility into reasoning is incredibly valuable. This feels like a progressive degradation rather than a UX improvement.

I don't want to assume motives, but from a user perspective: making this harder to access, then pointing to "low usage" to justify removing it entirely would be frustrating. Can Anthropic commit that full reasoning visibility will remain accessible for users who want it, even if it's not the default?

[TomMurrayAlz]

I genuinely can't believe that this vibe coding feature was released as the default option with no fallback, a potentially worrying indication of where Claude Code is heading, but I hope i'm wrong.

[aaronsb]

Claude code MUST show it's thinking in a more user friendly way. Italicized, highlighted some how as a thought bubble, I don't care. stop hiding it behind control-o reveal, because it's too slow. It should be a simple matter to configure claude to expose thinking if it's on, persistently as an option. I can't black box the thinking because it's shared with MY thinking.

Reading the thinking is like reading "body language" for a language model agent. If I can't read the body language, then I can't read the intent that's about to come next.

[IV2KBMoFxYIA]

+1 for this one. I somehow enabled it magically on a session on Claude Code 2.0.32 and it is showing the thinking as it happens. I wish I knew how I did that, since apparently it is possible.

[IV2KBMoFxYIA]

nevermind. i asked Claude itself.

[anthrotype]

I believe the "alwaysThinkingEnabled" setting was meant to enable thinking mode by default on startup so you don't have to press Tab, not to toggle whether the thinking is made visible.

[noughts]

I'm using v2.0.36 and confirmed that enabling verbose output does display Thinking logs as a workaround. However, this workaround has significant limitations:

1. Excessive log noise: Verbose mode displays numerous other logs alongside Thinking output, making it difficult to read and understand the actual thinking process
2. Degraded developer experience: Every time I need to review Thinking content, I have to filter through unrelated logs, which significantly hampers the development workflow

Adding an independent option to control Thinking log display (e.g., showThinkingLogs or verboseThinking) would provide substantial benefits:

• Ability to focus on Thinking content without distraction
• Easier debugging and understanding of the model's reasoning process
• Reduced noise by separating Thinking logs from other debug output
• Better workflow for developers who actively work on steering and improving Claude's thinking

This feature would be extremely valuable for users who want to understand and improve LLM reasoning processes. I'd greatly appreciate your consideration.

[adamavenir]

Just joining here to say this is a real problem for building UX-friendly things on the Claude ~~Code~~ Agent SDK.

As I said in this SDK issue

I have a suspicion (wild guess based on my own opinions on how I'd design the harness) that the reason the thinking output was removed is that they're now using more sophisticated model routing during extended thinking phases and involving calling multiple parallel subagents and, assuming that it's not 'secret sauce' they would prefer not to expose, it represents a challenge to present the result in a legible way given the current design.

And my further guess is they would like to just go "turn thinking back on" at some point and what we get there will actually be (multi-staged?) summar(ies) of the multi-agent process rather than the actual under-the-hood agent activity, as this will actually be more meaningful and understandable anyway but piecing that together is obviously a little challenging.

I say I suspect all this because this is exactly how I'm architecting agent 'thinking' phases in my own systems lol

[anthrotype]

The most frustrating thing is this would be trivial for Anthropic to solve: a config flag like showThinkingInline: true in settings.json, or a --show-thinking CLI flag. Instead, we have to resort to reverse-engineering minified JS (thanks @aleks-apostle for the service you provide to keep the patch working everytime CC gets updated!)

I suspect this is partly a case where the Claude Code team optimized for the median user experience (cleaner UI, less visual noise) without realizing how much they were degrading the experience for those users who care most deeply about the tool. The people patching JS to restore inline thinking are probably also the people filing the most useful bug reports and pushing the product's limits in productive ways.

[numman-ali]

+1

[TomMurrayAlz]

Looks like they've added a native fix for this...

/config > Verbose Output > True

[anthrotype]

Yes, it's true that with "Verbose Output" enabled the thinking summaries get shown, however a lot of other things (like the full output of tool calls) also get displayed which makes it difficult to read the thinking interspersed with the normal output, as it used to be before v2.0. Only the patch from @aleks-apostle restores the latter behavior.