Conversational Development With Claude Code — Part 8: Claude Code 2.0 + Sonnet 4.5

Conversational Development With Claude Code — Part 8: Claude Code 2.0 + Sonnet 4.5 (Checkpoints, VS Code, and the New Shape of “Thinking”) TL;DR — Claude Code 2.0 quietly changes the ergonomics of AI-assisted engineering: a proper VS Code surface, searchable prompt history, and checkpoints that let you roll back Claude edits without touching Git. Pair that with Sonnet 4.5 —built to stay coherent for long multi-step tasks—and you get a workflow that feels less like “chatting with a model” and more like running an opinionated engineering toolchain. This chapter is about control surfaces : updating the CLI + VS Code extension, using checkpoints as a safety net for exploration, and adopting the simplified “Thinking” toggles without losing rigor. Why this update matters (beyond “it looks nicer”) Most developer productivity wins don’t come from new features. They come from removing micro-friction : “I want Claude in the IDE, not in a separate terminal pane.” “I want to explore aggressively,