To try it: /config > verbose, or --verbose.
Please keep the feedback coming. If there is anything else we can do to adjust verbose mode to do what you want, I'd love to hear.
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.)
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.
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?”
I actually miss being able to see all of the thinking, for example, because I could tell more quickly when the model was making a wrong assumption and intervene.
It's not an easy UI problem to solve in all cases since behavior in CC can be so flexible, compaction, forking, etc. But it would be great if it was simply consistent (ctrl+o shows last N where N is like, 50, or 100), with ctrl+e revealing the rest.
That said, we recently rewrote our renderer to make it much more efficient, so we can bump up the default a bit. Let me see what it feels like to show the last 10-20 messages -- fix incoming.
o7
The thinking mode is super-useful to me as I _often_ saw the model "think" differently from the response. Stuff like "I can see that I need to look for x, y, z to full understand the problem" and then proceeds to just not do that.
This is helpful as I can interrupt the process and guide it to actually do this. With the thinking-output hidden, I have lost this avenue for intervention.
I also want to see what files it reads, but not necessarily the output - I know most of the files that'll be relevant, I just want to see it's not totally off base.
Tl;dr: I would _love_ to have verbose mode be split into two modes: Just thinking and Thinking+Full agent/file output.
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I'm happy to work in verbose mode. I get many people are probably fine with the standard minimal mode. But at least in my code base, on my projects, I still need to perform a decent amount of handholding through guidance, the model is not working for me the way you describe it working for you.
All I need is a few tools to help me intervene earlier to make claude-code work _much_ better for me. Right now I feel I'm fighting the system frequently.
Or have ctrl+o cycle between "Info, Verbose, Trace"?
Or give us full control over what gets logged through config?
Ideally we would get a new tab where we could pick logging levels on:
- Thoughts
- Files read / written
- Bashes
- Subagents
“Did something 2 times”
That may as well not be shown at all in default mode?
What useful information is imparted by “Read 4 files”?
You have two issues here:
1) making verbose mode better. Sure.
2) logging useless information in default.
If you're not imparting any useful information, claude may as well just show a spinner.
Like, I'm open to the idea that I'm the one using your software the wrong way, since obviously you know more about it than I do. What would you recommend I do with the knowledge of how many files Claude has read? Is there a situation where this number can tell me whether the model is on the right track?
shhh don't say that, they will never fix it if means you use less tokens.