I think I could share a trick that could help:
From my experience (so not an ultimate truth) Claude is not so great at taking the decision for planning by its own: it dives immediately into coding.
If you ask it to think step-by-step it still doesn’t do it but Gemini 2.5 Pro is good at that planning but terrible at actual coding.
So you can use Gemini as planner and Claude as programmer and you get something decent on RooCode.
This “think wisely” that you have to repeat 10x in the prompt is absolutely true
I think you misread my comment. I wasn't asking for help. I get consistent good output from Sonnet 4 using RooCode, without needing Gemini for planning.
Edit: I think I know where our miscommunication is happening...
The "think"/"ultrathink" series of magic words are a claudecode specific feature used to control the max thinking tokens in the request. For example, in claude code, saying "ultrathink" sets the max thinking tokens to 32k.
On other clients these keywords do nothing. In Roo, max thinking tokens is a setting. You can just set it to 32k, and then that's the same as saying "ultrathink" in every prompt in claudecode. But in Roo, I can also setup different settings profiles to use for each mode (with different max thinking token settings), configure the mode prompt, system prompt, etc. No magic keywords needed.. and you have full control over the request.
Claude Code doesn't expose that level of control.