April 2026 CC usage notes

April 11, 2026

Claude Code is the fanciest coding assistant out there as of April 2026, and I even use it at work. But as happens to nice things that everyone uses, it has started defaulting to settings I find very slightly less nice than they could be. And I’ve wished there were a good way to scroll through old sessions to remind myself how the prompts and assistant responses looked during a session from a few days or weeks ago.

So here are some settings that seem to help, and a little app for browsing session traces.

Claude Code settings

Here’s one of the best bug reports ever, about “extended thinking” going away: Extended Thinking is Load Bearing for Senior Engineering Workflows. Basically, Claude got worse at programming tasks, due in part to Anthropic turning changing some defaults to “don’t try as hard or think as carefully”.

The Hacker News thread about the bug report includes a bunch of helpful workarounds. Here are a few:

Environment variables in my .zshrc file:

    CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING=1 # Think consistently
    CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL=max            # Think hard

And then, since I was in there anyway, I identified these two:

    CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1  # Less telemetry
    CLAUDE_CODE_ATTRIBUTION_HEADER=0            # Less boilerplate

I’m not being as scientific as others, but I can say that the result feels a little more capable.

If I were being more rigorous in my analysis, I would need a…

claude-chat-viewer for browsing logs

I’m pretty sure everyone on the internet has built one of these. One of the nice things about LLM coding assistants is that the assistant just talks to an LLM with plain text, which gets logged and can be browsed nicely.

Mine only took a few minutes to throw together: claude-chat-viewer.

But the data

So it turns out that Claude Code erases your logs for you after 30 days or so, which requires one to take active measures to copy them somewhere durable before then.

Here’s a command that updates the backup copy in my Syncthing directory, which

	rsync -a ~/.claude/projects/ ~/Sync/air-claude-history-backup/

I back it up it every hour using a cron job:

	0 * * * * rsync -a /Users/josh/.claude/projects/ /Users/josh/Sync/air-claude-history-backup/

Everyone has pretty much the same AI, but only you have your data.