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Why this tool does not patch cli.js

The honest limitation of env-vars

Env vars applied to ~/.claude/settings.json are read by Claude Code at startup and used to configure the main request loop. That's enough to close most of the regression gap — but not all of it.

Per @Frisch12's binary analysis on issue #42796:

  • CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING=1 is checked in 1 of 5 adaptive code paths.
  • The remaining 4 paths — notably subagent spawning through the V9H() helper and some tool-use fallbacks — do not check the env var. They apply adaptive thinking unconditionally.

Practical consequence: if you rely on subagents (Agent tool invocations, Task-based parallel work), they will still occasionally produce zero-thinking turns even with this tool installed. The main loop, however, is fixed.

Why we don't patch cli.js directly

It would be trivial to write a patcher that edits cli.js to force-disable adaptive thinking everywhere. We deliberately do not, for three reasons:

  1. Terms of Service. Anthropic's ToS forbid reverse engineering or modifying their software. A patcher walks squarely into that grey area. Even if individual patches are low-risk in practice, publishing a tool that automates binary modification normalises it and puts users in a position where Anthropic support may decline to help them.

  2. Fragility. cli.js is re-minified on every Claude Code release. Variable names like V9H change from one build to the next. A patcher would need per-version signatures, maintained manually. With the 2.1.104+ Bun-compiled binary, the patch surface becomes a native executable — substantially harder and riskier to modify.

  3. It's a workaround, not a fix. The right remedy is upstream. Anthropic has acknowledged the regression in the issue tracker and on Hacker News. The correct path is: apply env vars as a partial mitigation, track the upstream fix, remove the workaround when it lands. A binary patcher would delay that cycle by making the symptom tolerable.

What to do about subagents

For users of opinionated workflow frameworks (SuperFlow and similar), the answer is to define agents explicitly in ~/.claude/agents/*.md with effort: max or effort: high frontmatter. That closes the subagent gap for agents you define and spawn explicitly. Built-in subagents (those defined inside the Claude Code binary itself) remain out of reach until Anthropic ships the fix.

Pattern-based agent-file patching is intentionally out of scope for v0.1 of this tool (see v0.2 roadmap). For now: if you use SuperFlow, run superflow update. If you have a custom setup, edit your agent files manually.

When to remove this tool

Watch issue #42796 for the upstream fix. When Anthropic raises the default effort back to high (or exposes a proper config knob), cc-anti-regression uninstall returns your settings.json to its pre-install state. Backups are kept, so there's no lossy path.