You are integrating Claude Code into your Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline.

Option A is correct because the failure results from excessive output volume, not from JSON or tool use. Anthropic documents that max_tokens is a hard output ceiling and that a response stopped at this limit reports stop_reason: " max_tokens " . Its tool-streaming guidance also warns that generation can stop midway through a tool parameter, leaving partial JSON that must not be treated as complete. Splitting the pull request into bounded file groups limits the number of findings produced by each call, preserves the report_findings schema, and allows the pipeline to validate every response independently before merging and deduplicating the arrays. Shared dependency context can still be included when cross-file analysis is required.

Option B only postpones the failure because the model’s output maximum remains finite. Option C abandons the structured contract and makes deterministic parsing less reliable. Option D changes the review requirements by suppressing potentially valuable lower-severity findings, while the retried request could still reach the same limit. Controlled partitioning followed by deterministic aggregation is therefore the most reliable and scalable design. Anthropic stop-reason guidance and tool-streaming guidance .