Overthinking and excessive thoroughness

Overthinking and excessive thoroughness

Claude Opus 4.6 does more upfront exploration than previous models, especially at higher 

effort

 settings. This initial work often helps to optimize the final results, but the model may gather extensive context or pursue multiple threads of research without being prompted. If your prompts previously encouraged the model to be more thorough, you should tune that guidance for Claude Opus 4.6:

Replace blanket defaults with more targeted instructions.
 Instead of "Default to using [tool]," add guidance like "Use [tool] when it would enhance your understanding of the problem."

Remove over-prompting.
 Tools that undertriggered in previous models are likely to trigger appropriately now. Instructions like "If in doubt, use [tool]" will cause overtriggering.

Use effort as a fallback.
 If Claude continues to be overly aggressive, use a lower setting for 
effort
.

In some cases, Claude Opus 4.6 may think extensively, which can inflate thinking tokens and slow down responses. If this behavior is undesirable, you can add explicit instructions to constrain its reasoning, or you can lower the 
effort
 setting to reduce overall thinking and token usage.