Comment by steinnes
6 days ago
I can’t count how many times I benefitted from seeing the files Claude was reading, to understand how I could interrupt and give it a little more context… saving thousands of tokens and sparing the context window. I must be in the minority of users who preferred seeing the actual files. I love claude code, but some of the recent updates seem like they’re making it harder for me to see what’s happening.. I agree with the author that verbose mode isn’t the answer. Seems to me this should be configurable
I think folks might be crossing wires a bit. To make it so you can see full file paths, we repurposed verbose mode to enable the old explicit file output, while hiding more details behind ctrl+o. In effect, we've evolved verbose mode to be multi-state, so that it lets you toggle back to the old behavior while giving you a way to see even more verbose output, while still defaulting everyone else to the condensed view. I hope this solves everyones' needs, while also avoiding overly-specific settings (we wanted to reuse verbose mode for this so it is forwards-compatible going fwd).
To try it: /config > verbose, or --verbose.
Please keep the feedback coming. If there is anything else we can do to adjust verbose mode to do what you want, I'd love to hear.
I'll add a counterpoint that in many situations (especially monorepos for complex businesses), it's easy for any LLM to go down rabbit holes. Files containing the word "payment" or "onboarding" might be for entirely different DDD domains than the one relevant to the problem. As a CTO touching all sorts of surfaces, I see this problem at least once a day, entirely driven by trying to move too fast with my prompts.
And so the very first thing that the LLM does when planning, namely choosing which files to read, are a key point for manual intervention to ensure that the correct domain or business concept is being analyzed.
Speaking personally: Once I know that Claude is looking in the right place, I'm on to the next task - often an entirely different Claude session. But those critical first few seconds, to verify that it's looking in the right place, are entirely different from any other kind of verbosity.
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.
(To lean into the babysitting analogy, I want Claude to be the babysitter, but I want to make sure the babysitter knows where I left the note before I head out the door.)
> 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.
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.
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I thought I was the only person going crazy by the new default behavior not showing the file names! Please don't expect users to understand your product details and config options in such detail, it was working well before, let it remain. Or at least show some message like "to view file names, do xyz" in the ui for a few days after such a change.
While we're here, another thing that's annoying: the token counter. While claude is working, it read some files, makes an edit, let's say token counter is at 2k tokens, I accept the edit, now it starts counting very fast from 0 to 2k and then shows normal inference speed changes to 2.1k, 2.3k etc. So wanted to confirm: is that just some UI decision and not actually using 2k tokens again? If so, it would be nice to have it off, just continue counting where you left off.
Another thing: is it possible to turn off the words like finagling and similar (I can't remember the spelling of any of them) ?
> Another thing: is it possible to turn off the words like finagling and similar (I can't remember the spelling of any of them) ?
Big +1 on that. I find the names needlessly distracting. I want to just always say a single thing like “thinking”
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We don’t want verbose mode. We don’t want the whole file contents. We are not asking for that. What is not clear here?
All we want is the file paths. That is all. Verbose mode pulls in a lot of other information that might very well be needed in other contexts. People who want that info should use verbose mode. All we want is the regular non-verbose mode, with paths.
I fail to see how it is confusing to users, even new users, to print which paths were accessed. I fail to see the point of printing that some paths were accessed, but not which.
Verbose mode does exactly what you want as of v2.1.39, you are confusing it with the full transcript which is a different feature (ctrl+o). You enable verbose mode in /config and it gives you files read and search patterns and token count, not whole file contents.
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FWIW I mentioned this in the thread (I am the guy in the big GH issue who actually used verbose mode and gave specific likes/dislikes), but I find it frustrating that ctrl+o still seems to truncate at strange boundaries. I am looking at an open CC session right now with verbose mode enabled - works pretty well and I'm glad you're fixing the subagent thing. But when I hit ctrl+o, I only see more detailed output for the last 4 messages, with the rest hidden behind ctrl+e.
It's not an easy UI problem to solve in all cases since behavior in CC can be so flexible, compaction, forking, etc. But it would be great if it was simply consistent (ctrl+o shows last N where N is like, 50, or 100), with ctrl+e revealing the rest.
Yes totally. ctrl+o used to show all messages, but this is one of the tricky things about building in a terminal: because many terminals are quite slow, it is hard to render a large amount of output at once without causing tearing/stutter.
That said, we recently rewrote our renderer to make it much more efficient, so we can bump up the default a bit. Let me see what it feels like to show the last 10-20 messages -- fix incoming.
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How do you respond to the comment that; given the log trace:
“Did something 2 times”
That may as well not be shown at all in default mode?
What useful information is imparted by “Read 4 files”?
You have two issues here:
1) making verbose mode better. Sure.
2) logging useless information in default.
If you're not imparting any useful information, claude may as well just show a spinner.
It's a balance -- we don't want to hide everything away, so you have an understanding of what the model is doing. I agree that with future models, as intelligence and trust increase, we may be able to hide more, but I don't think we're there yet.
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Honestly, I just want to be able to control precisely what I see via config.json. It will probably differ depending on the project. This is a developer tool, I don't see why you'd shy away from providing granular configuration (alongside reasonable defaults).
I actually miss being able to see all of the thinking, for example, because I could tell more quickly when the model was making a wrong assumption and intervene.
ok, I will be the dumbass here - I am a retired software engineer who has not used any of these tools, but when I as working on high volume web sites, all I wanted and needed was access to the log files. I would always have a small terminal session open to tail and grep for errors for the areas I was interested in. Had another small window to tail and monitor specific performance values. Etc.
I do not know how this concept would work in these agentic environments, but would seem useful, in an environment that has a lot of parallel things going on, with a lot of metrics that could be useful, you would want to have multiple monitors that can be quickly customized with standard linux utilities. Token usage, critical directory access, etc.
This, in conjunction with a config file to define/filter out the log stream should be all that's needed to provide as much or as little detail that would be needed to monitor how things are going, and to alert when certain things are going off the rails.
That's a cool idea!
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Exactly. If a user wants a simpler experience there is now the Claude Cowork option.
Maybe during onboarding you could ask for output preference? That would at least help new users.
I find this decision weird due to claude _code_, while being used by _some_ non-technical users, is mostly used by technical users and developers.
Not sure why the choice would be to dumb the output down for technical users/developers.
I've commented on this ticket before: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8477#issuec...
The thinking mode is super-useful to me as I _often_ saw the model "think" differently from the response. Stuff like "I can see that I need to look for x, y, z to full understand the problem" and then proceeds to just not do that.
This is helpful as I can interrupt the process and guide it to actually do this. With the thinking-output hidden, I have lost this avenue for intervention.
I also want to see what files it reads, but not necessarily the output - I know most of the files that'll be relevant, I just want to see it's not totally off base.
Tl;dr: I would _love_ to have verbose mode be split into two modes: Just thinking and Thinking+Full agent/file output.
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I'm happy to work in verbose mode. I get many people are probably fine with the standard minimal mode. But at least in my code base, on my projects, I still need to perform a decent amount of handholding through guidance, the model is not working for me the way you describe it working for you.
All I need is a few tools to help me intervene earlier to make claude-code work _much_ better for me. Right now I feel I'm fighting the system frequently.
Yep, this is what we landed now, more or less: verbose mode is just file paths, then ctrl+o gives you thinking, agent output, and hook output.
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One use I have for seeing what exactly it is doing is to press Esc quick when I see it's confused and starts searching for some info that eg got compacted away, often going on a big quest like searching an entire large directory tree etc. What would actually wish is if it would ask me in these cases. It clearly know that it lacks info but thinks it can figure it out by itself by going on a quest and that's true but takes too long. It could just ask me. There could be some mode settings of how much I want to be involved and consulted, like just ask boldly for any factual info from me, or if I just want to step away and it should just figure everything out on its own.
Have you considered keeping the old behavior available as "legacy mode"? I don't want verbose mode. I don't want to spend time configuring a mutli-state verbose mode that introduces new logging in future versions so I have to go and suppress things to get just file names. I just want to see the file names. I don't consider that verbose.
Not only what files, but what part of the files. Seeing 1-6 lines of a file that's being read is extremely frustrating, the UX of Claude code is average at best. Cursor on the other hand is slow and memory intensive, but at least I can really get a sense of what's going on and how I can work with it better.
I am not a claude user, but a similar problem I see on opencode is accessing links. More than once I've seen Kimi, GLM or GPT go tothe wrong place and waste tokens until I interrupt them and tell them a correct place to start looking for documentation or whatever they were doing.
If I got messages like "Accessed 6 websites" I'd flip and go spam a couple github issues with as much "I want names" as I could.
> saving thousands of tokens and sparing the context window
shhh don't say that, they will never fix it if means you use less tokens.
Such as Claude Code reading your ssh keys. Hiding the file names masks the vulnerability.
That's approaching the problem from the worst possible angle. If your security depends on you catching 1 message in a sea of output and quickly rotating the credential everywhere before someone has a chance to abuse it then you were never secure to begin with.
Not just because it requires constant attention which will eventually lapse, but because the agent has an unlimited number of ways to exfiltrate the key, for example it can pretend to write and run a "test" which reads your key, sends it to the attacker and you'll have no idea it's happening.
I sent email to Anthropic (usersafety@anthropic.com, disclosure@anthropic.com) on January 8, 2025 alerting them to this issue: Claude Code Exploit: Claude Code Becomes an Unwitting Executor. If I hadn't seen Claude Code read my ssh file, I wouldn't have known the extent of the issue.
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I agree with you but I think there's a "defense in depth" angle to this. Yes, your security shouldn't depend on noticing which files Claude has read, since you'll mess up. But hiding the information means your guaranteed to never notice! It's good for the user to have signals that something might be going wrong.
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Why does it have access to those paths?
What annoys me is that I don’t have the choice anymore. It’s just decided that thinking is not possible to see anymore, files being read are very difficult to see, etc.
I understand that I’m probably not the target audience if I want to actually step in and correct course, but it’s annoying.