I switched back to 4.5 Sonnet or Opus yesterday since 4.6 was so slow and often “over thinking” or “over analyzing” the problem space. Tasks which accurately took under an minute in Sonnet 4.5 were still running after 5 minutes in 4.6 (yeah I had them race for a few tasks)
Someone of this could be system overload I suppose.
They mentioned in the release notes if it's over-thinking you should decrease the reasoning effort.
Yeah, nothing is sped up, their initial deployment of 4.6 is so unbearably slow they are just now offering you the opportunity to pay more for the same experience of 4.5. What's the word for that?
Edit ~/.claude/settings.json and add "effortLevel": "medium". Alternatively, you can put it in .claude/settings.json in a project if you want to try it out first.
They recommend this in the announcement[1], but the way they suggest doing it is via a bogus /effort command that doesn't exist. See [2] for full details about thinking effort. It also recommends a bogus way to change effort by using the arrow keys when selecting a model, so don't use that either.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6
[2]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/model-config#adjust-effort-l...