¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Problem statement: Claude Code responses have been getting shorter lately.

There’s been discussion on HN and a blog post about Claude Code being “dumbed down” with increasingly terse outputs.

Before:

After:

Simply add "outputStyle": "verbose" to your .claude/settings.json to restore the original behavior:

diff --git claude/.claude/settings.json claude/.claude/settings.json
index 13a58d2..7f59e73 100644
--- claude/.claude/settings.json
+++ claude/.claude/settings.json
@@ -95,5 +95,6 @@
     "lua-lsp@claude-plugins-official": true,
     "gopls-lsp@claude-plugins-official": true
   },
-  "alwaysThinkingEnabled": true
+  "alwaysThinkingEnabled": true,
+  "outputStyle": "verbose"
 }

“Verbose” is misleading in this context.

It sounds like -vvv and a firehose of logs and agent thinking traces filling your terminal screen, but it is not.

As per Boris from the Claude Code team, in the aforementioned HN thread:

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.

This is a comment for this reply:

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.

I find it a collective humanity waste of time that a thread like this gathers 600+ comments.

But it’s just another day of a poor UX decision for power users. You address it with a workaround, and then life moves on.