That's good advice. I managed to get the session back on track by doing that a few turns later. I started making it very explicit that I wanted it to really think things through. It kept asking me for permission to do things, I had to explicitly prompt it to trace through and resolve every single edge case it ran into, but it seems to be doing better now. It's running a lot of adversarial tests right now and the results at least seem to be more thorough and acceptable. It's gonna take a while to fully review the output though.

It's just that Opus 4.6 DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING=1 doesn't seem to require me to do this at all, or at least not as often. It'd fully explore the code and take into account all the edge cases and caveats without any explicit prompting from me. It's a really frustrating experience to watch Anthropic's flagship subscription-only model burn my tokens only to end up lazily hand-waving away hard questions unless I explicitly tell it not to do that.

I have to give it to Opus 4.7 though: it recovered much better than 4.6.