Claude Code Extended Thinking Tips: Master AI-Powered Development in 2025
Unlock the Full Potential of Claude 4’s Revolutionary Thinking Mode for Developers
In May 2025, Anthropic revolutionized AI-powered coding with the release of Claude 4 and its groundbreaking extended thinking capabilities. This comprehensive guide reveals expert tips and proven strategies to maximize Claude Code’s thinking mode, helping developers achieve up to 54% improvement in complex coding tasks.
What is Claude Code Extended Thinking?
Extended thinking represents a paradigm shift in how AI models approach complex problems. Unlike traditional AI responses, Claude 4 models can take more time to consider possible solutions to a given problem before answering, enabling deeper reasoning and more accurate outputs.
Key Features of Extended Thinking:
- Deep Reasoning Before Response: Extended thinking is all about what Claude does before it starts generating a response. With extended thinking, Claude deeply considers and iterates on its plan before taking action
- Adaptive Thinking Budget: From 1,024 tokens minimum to unlimited depth for complex problems
- Multi-Step Problem Solving: Perfect for complex coding challenges, mathematical proofs, and architectural decisions
- Tool Integration: Both models can use tools—like web search—during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve responses
Essential Extended Thinking Tips for Maximum Performance
1. Start with High-Level Instructions
Claude often performs better with high level instructions to just think deeply about a task rather than step-by-step prescriptive guidance. The model’s creativity in approaching problems may exceed a human’s ability to prescribe the optimal thinking process
Instead of:
Think through this math problem step by step:
1. First, identify the variables
2. Then, set up the equation
3. Next, solve for x
Try this:
Please think about this math problem thoroughly and in great detail.
Consider multiple approaches and show your complete reasoning.
2. Use Magic Phrases to Trigger Thinking Levels
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
- “think” – Basic extended thinking
- “think hard” – Increased computation budget
- “think harder” – Significant reasoning depth
- “ultrathink” – Maximum reasoning capabilities
3. Implement the Research-Plan-Execute Workflow
Steps #1-#2 are crucial—without them, Claude tends to jump straight to coding a solution. While sometimes that’s what you want, asking Claude to research and plan first significantly improves performance for problems requiring deeper thinking upfront
claude "Research approaches to implement OAuth2 in our Node.js app"
claude "Make a plan for adding OAuth2 authentication (think hard)"
claude "Implement the OAuth2 solution based on your plan"
4. Leverage Multishot Prompting
Multishot prompting works well with extended thinking. When you provide Claude examples of how to think through problems, it will follow similar reasoning patterns within its extended thinking blocks
Include examples with <thinking> or <scratchpad> tags to show Claude your preferred reasoning patterns.
5. Optimize for Language and Output
Extended thinking performs best in English, though final outputs can be in any language Claude supports
For clean responses: instruct Claude not to repeat its extended thinking and to only output the answer
6. Verify Work with Built-in Testing
Ask Claude to verify its work with a simple test before declaring a task complete
Write a function to calculate the factorial of a number.
Before you finish, please verify your solution with test cases for:
- n=0
- n=1
- n=5
- n=10
And fix any issues you find.
Extended Thinking vs. The “Think” Tool: Know the Difference
Understanding when to use extended thinking versus the “think” tool is crucial for optimal performance:
Use Extended Thinking When:
- Solving complex coding problems from scratch
- Working on mathematical or physics problems
- Planning architecture or system design
- You don’t need Claude to call external tools
Use the “Think” Tool When:
- Claude needs to call complex tools, analyze tool outputs carefully in long chains of tool calls, navigate policy-heavy environments with detailed guidelines, or make sequential decisions where each step builds on previous ones and mistakes are costly
- Processing external information from APIs or databases
- Making decisions based on tool outputs
Performance Metrics: Real-World Impact
Recent benchmarks demonstrate the power of extended thinking:
- 54% improvement in complex airline policy navigation tasks
- Up to 10% improvement in code generation over previous models
- Industry-leading performance on SWE-bench Verified for real software engineering tasks
Best Practices for Production Use
1. Budget Optimization
The minimum budget is 1,024 tokens. We suggest starting at the minimum and increasing the thinking budget incrementally to find the optimal range for your use case
2. Memory Management
When given access to local files, Claude Opus 4 records key information to help improve its game play – Use memory files for long-term context retention in complex projects.
3. Cost Considerations
- Standard thinking mode: Most cost-effective for routine tasks
- Extended thinking: Reserve for complex problems requiring deep reasoning
- Monitor usage: the average spend per user is $6/day on Claude Code
Advanced Techniques for Power Users
Sequential Framework Analysis
By specifying multiple analytical frameworks that must be applied sequentially, thinking time naturally increases as Claude works through each framework methodically
Test-Driven Development Integration
Combine extended thinking with TDD for superior results:
- Ask Claude to write tests first (with extended thinking)
- Verify tests fail
- Implement solutions using thinking mode
- Iterate until all tests pass
IDE Integration
Claude Code now integrates seamlessly with:
- VS Code
- JetBrains IDEs
- GitHub (for PR reviews and fixes)
- GitLab
Getting Started with Claude Code Extended Thinking
- Install Claude Code: Available for macOS, Linux, and Windows (via WSL)
- Authenticate: Complete OAuth with your Claude Max or Anthropic Console account
- Start Simple: Begin with basic “think” commands before progressing to “ultrathink”
- Monitor Performance: Use the built-in feedback system to optimize your workflow
