Tools: Free Claude Code Is Being Dumbed Down 2026

Version 2.1.20 of Claude Code shipped a change that replaced every file read and every search pattern with a single, useless summary line.

You’re paying $200 a month for a tool that now hides what it’s doing with your codebase by default.

Across multiple GitHub issues opened for this, all comments are pretty much saying the same thing: give us back the file paths, or at minimum, give us a toggle.

For the majority of users, this change is a nice simplification that reduces noise.

What majority? The change just shipped and the only response it got is people complaining.

Then when pressed, the fix offered wasn’t to revert or add a toggle. It was: “just use verbose mode.”

A big ‘ole dump of thinking traces, hook output, full subagent transcripts, and entire file contents into your terminal. People explained, repeatedly, that they wanted one specific thing: file paths and search patterns inline. Not a firehose of debug output.

I want to hear folks’ feedback on what’s missing from verbose mode to make it the right approach for your use case.

Read that again. Thirty people say “revert the change or give us a toggle.” The answer is “let me make verbose mode work for you instead.”

If you are going to display something like ‘Searched for 13 patterns, read 2 files’ there is nothing I can do with that information. You might as well not display it at all.

Source: HackerNews