When using the Claude API, enable extended thinking for problems that require deep reasoning:
response = client.messages.create(
model="claude-opus-4-6",
max_tokens=16000,
thinking={
"type": "enabled",
"budget_tokens": 10000
},
messages=[{
"role": "user",
"content": "Analyze this distributed systems architecture..."
}]
)Extended thinking gives Claude a “scratchpad” to reason through problems step-by-step before producing the final answer. It makes a big difference on math, logic, code architecture, and multi-constraint problems.