A Claude API call using output_config.format (json_schema structured outputs) with thinking:{type:"adaptive"} burns most of its output budget on thinking (observed ~21k of ~24k tokens) without improving JSON quality, making the run up to ~5x more expensive than the same call with thinking omitted — use when calling the Messages API with a json_schema output format for extraction, ranking, classification, or summarization tasks, or when a schema-constrained call's usage.output_tokens is far larger than the returned JSON.
