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@dickfickling beat me to it, but ultrathink is already explicitly called out in the public Anthropic documentation:

"Ask Claude to make a plan for how to approach a specific problem. We recommend using the word "think" to trigger extended thinking mode, which gives Claude additional computation time to evaluate alternatives more thoroughly. These specific phrases are mapped directly to increasing levels of thinking budget in the system: "think" < "think hard" < "think harder" < "ultrathink." Each level allocates progressively more thinking budget for Claude to use."

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

I don't know what the max allowable "budget_tokens" is for Claude 3.7 Thinking mode, but the SDK shows an example of 32k which matches up with the article's findings.

megathink sounds better

Crazy that it's a key word that's implemented in the code that expands the context window, and that a light touch of reverse engineering was required to find it.

It’s fair to point out this is probably already evidence for AGI. Most days I personally am only able to infrathink at best.

I think I'll wait for Hyperthink.

This would be helpful information if I hadn’t already switched to Gemini 2.5 because it’s 96% cheaper

It would be cool if these "secret keywords" were more directly exposed in the UI somehow, perhaps as a toggleable developer/experimental mode? I would have a lot of fun tinkering with them.

I asked Claude if this was true, and Claude confirmed.

That very very quickly moved from blog to twitter to blog to HN. Gotta love the velocity of information these days

I'm scratching my head a bit at this one.

I already assume that the models are shifting underneath me. It's very frustrating that most non-developers just think you can ask an LLM a question and it will respond accurately each time. They are designed to make creative output and even if you dial down the temperature they still can hallucinate.

Why not be explicit about the thinking budget instead of aliasing it to a number with a term like ultrathink?

It's a cute word, and fun to know is managed on the client side, but isn't it again more imprecision to tools the are already suffering from that?

Tengu think? As in Japanese Tengu?

I hope we will exit this stage of magic spells and incantations sooner rather than later.

Nice to know, although I was taught that the magic word is "please".