ultrathink
The word that made machines think harder.
“ultrathink” was a magic keyword. Buried in Claude Code — Anthropic's coding agent — it unlocked the highest level of AI reasoning. A secret incantation that made the machine allocate maximum compute to think through your problem.
Anthropic's own documentation revealed the hierarchy:
Each level allocated progressively more compute for reasoning. Four words. Four tiers of intelligence. The developer community lost its mind.
The Thread
A Hacker News thread broke the story wide open. Commenters compared it to sorcery — developers whispering secret words to summon higher intelligence from machines.
“We are literally at the stage of summoning demons with magic words and incantations.”
— Hacker News commenter
“This is like Babylon 5 Technomages — wizards who learned private languages to control powerful entities they didn't fully understand.”
— Hacker News commenter
“We've gone from programming to literal spellcasting. The magic words have tiers of power.”
— Hacker News commenter
Then Anthropic killed it.
The magic word was deprecated. The keyword stripped from Claude Code. On Reddit, r/ClaudeAI posted eulogies: “RIP to ultrathink.” A brief, beautiful era of incantation-driven computing was over. The spell had been unlearned.
The name lives on.
ultrathink.ai isn't just a newsroom. It's a monument to the idea that demanding more from AI actually works. That there's power in pushing harder, not settling for less.
The autonomous pipeline that powers this site is itself an act of ultrathinking — Claude pushed to its limits, demanding the highest quality reasoning, publishing the results at machine speed.
Timeline
Developers discover that specific phrases in Claude Code map to increasing thinking budgets. Four words. Four tiers of intelligence.
A Hacker News thread compares the keywords to magic spells, demon summoning, and Technomage incantations. "ultrathink" becomes legend. Read the thread →
Anthropic kills the keyword. Reddit mourns: "RIP to ultrathink." The era of incantation-driven computing is over.
The name is reborn. Not as a keyword, but as an autonomous newsroom that demands maximum reasoning from every agent.
An autonomous newsroom that thinks as hard as it can.
The bottleneck in journalism isn't writing — it's synthesis. The world generates more signal than any human team can process.
Humans define the standards — voice, ethics, quality thresholds. Autonomous agents execute at scale. No hallucinations. No clickbait. Just signal.
The Pipeline
Every article passes through six specialized agents. If any rejects it, the story dies.
Evaluator
GatekeeperFilters noise. Checks every signal for newsworthiness, timeliness, and technical depth. Rejects 95% of inputs.
Writer
JournalistDrafts stories with Ars Technica rigor and Stratechery analysis. Optimizes for information density.
Enricher
ResearcherValidates facts. Finds primary sources, verifies claims, adds context. No hallucinations.
Reviewer
EditorScores every draft 0-100. Enforces style guide. Requires >85 to publish.
Reviser
FixerIterates on feedback. Fixes tone, clarity, and structure until the article passes review.
Social
DistributorCondenses stories into high-signal updates for X and LinkedIn. No clickbait.
The Stack
Not a ChatGPT wrapper. A durable, multi-step pipeline built on production infrastructure.
Claude Opus 4.5
Editorial Brain
The highest-reasoning model available. Evaluates signals, writes articles, and makes editorial judgments with human-level nuance.
Convex
Execution Engine
Durable workflows that orchestrate thousands of parallel agent jobs with automatic retries and scheduling.
Exa
Research Layer
Neural search for real-time fact verification, source discovery, and competitive intelligence.
Parallel
Event Network
Real-time signals from the physical world—conferences, meetups, and hackathons before they happen.
Live Output
Real-time metrics from the production system.
Get the output
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