Welcome to the show, everyone!
I'm Lachlan Reed, coming to you from my backyard shed, and I'm joined by James
Turner.
We've got a massive tech hook for you today, and thanks to Jellypod to help make
this daily show a reality.
If you've been running Claude Code for agentic workflows, you know the absolute gut
punch of hitting API rate limits right in the middle of a complex deploy.
Well, Anthropic just threw us a massive lifeline.
Oh, they absolutely did.
We are talking about true multi-model resilience now.
You can now configure up to three fallback models in strict order using the new
`fallbackModel` setting in your config file, or just append the `--fallback-model`
flag on the fly.
If Claude 3.5 Sonnet starts throwing 429 rate-limit errors or peak-traffic
overloads, your agentic terminal loop will immediately fall back to your secondary
or tertiary choice without crashing the run.
That is fair dinkum brilliant.
No more babysitting a script only for it to fall over at 2:00 AM because of API
congestion.
You could literally set Sonnet as primary, fallback to Haiku for speed,
and then maybe keep an older model as a safety net.
It's beautiful.
But wait, James, if we're falling back to models that have deep reasoning
capabilities, isn't that going to run up the bill with thinking tokens?
[questioning tone] It definitely can, which brings us to the second major
configuration change: thinking toggles.
For workflows where you do not need deep chain-of-thought processing,
you can completely disable thinking by setting `MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=0` in your
environment, or simply run `--thinking disabled`.
Disable it entirely?
That makes a lot of sense for simple, structured tasks.
Like, if I'm just regex-parsing some logs, I don't need Claude spending five seconds
and thousands of tokens pondering the meaning of life before it writes the script.
It's a huge latency and cost saver.
Exactly.
Save the heavy thinking for complex logic, and bypass it for routine file
manipulations.
And speaking of file manipulations, the latest security prompt updates are a massive
deal.
Claude Code now has explicit guardrails around critical system files.
It prompts for explicit user permission before touching things like your SSH keys,
shell profiles, or global env files.
No worries about an agent accidentally nuking your `.bashrc` or sending your private
keys off to a remote server then.
That's a massive relief for local execution.
And while we're on local workflows, have you seen the new `/btw` command?
It copies the last command output directly to your system clipboard.
Oh, the clipboard copy!
It's such a simple quality-of-life addition, but not having to drag-select text in a
messy terminal window is a game-changer.
You just type `/btw` and paste it right into your documentation or Slack.
It's the little things that keep us sane, mate.
Keep those fallbacks configured and your system files locked down.
That's all for today's quick tech breakdown.
Catch you next time!
See ya!