Having a "Recovery Mode"/"Safe Boot" flag to disable our configurations (or progressively enable) to see how claude code responds would be nice. Sometimes I get worried some old flag I set is breaking things. Maybe the flag already exists? I tried Claude doctor but it wasn't quite the solution.

For instance:

Is Haiku supposed to hit a warm system-prompt cache in a default Claude code setup?

I had `DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1` in my env and found the haiku requests would not hit a warm-cached system prompt. E.g. on first request just now w/ most recent version (v2.1.118, but happened on others):

w/ telemetry off - input_tokens:10 cache_read:0 cache_write:28897 out:249

w/ telemetry on - input_tokens:10 cache_read:24344 cache_write:7237 out:243

I used to think having so many users was leading to people hitting a lot of edge cases, 3 million users is 3 million different problems. Everyone can't be on the happy path. But then I started hitting weird edge cases and started thinking the permutations might not be under control.

Off topic, but I'm hoping you'll maybe see this. There's been an issue with the VS code extension that makes it pretty much impossible to use (PreToolUse can't intercept permission requests anymore, using PermissionRequest hooks always open the diff viewer and steals focus):

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/36286 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/25018

> people didn't understand to use /effort to increase intelligence, and often stuck with the default -- we should have anticipated this

UI is UI. It is naive to expect that you build some UI but users will "just magically" find out that they should use it as a terminal in the first place.

You didn’t anticipate most people stick with defaults?

“after evals and dogfooding” couldn’t have done this before releasing the model? We are paying $200/month to beta test the software for you.