Yes hasn’t this been around since Opus 4.6? I very much recall this change happening around January or February, and it was very explicitly to prevent distillation. Sonnet does not have this limitation.

Fun fact: if you go back to the old school from 2 years ago and provide explicit CoT prompts, you get the full thinking prompts back again!

So you disable thinking altogether, and instead make thinking part of the regular prompt by prompting it:

“Before providing your answer, think step by step. For example:

The use is asking me to… I need to think about the blah blah. First, I should foo the bar, and then blah blah.

Answer: <put your final answer here>”

And tada.wav we have CoT as it worked in the GPT3 era back again.

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dcrazy a day ago | parent | next [-]

I thought this was considered best practice? I actually prefer it to exposed thought channel, much like how I would prefer a human answer with supporting logic instead of an explanation of their problem-solving approach.

	▲	stingraycharles a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, this is best practice, especially if you have a problem and can guide it a bit how to think it through. But people don’t realize that “enable thinking” literally means that Anthropic prompts Claude for something similar, tells it to wrap it inside <thinking> tokens, and that’s it. I also don’t believe Chinese LLM labs don’t know this, so I’m fairly certain the whole summarized thinking isn’t preventing them from distillation.
	▲	Creamsicle47 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

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KellyCriterion a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

- tada.wav -

Still, one of the daily most played WAV files worldwide, Id guess? :-D

	▲	stingraycharles a day ago \| parent [-]
		lol I’ve been using this since the IRC days I think, I’ll never forget that sound; as a matter of fact, I’ve got a Claude Code completion hook that plays this sound whenever it’s done.

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0o_MrPatrick_o0 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Awesome share! Thank you!