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best practice

Master Claude Opus 5 Reasoning via the Effort Parameter

Toggle the effort ladder to prioritize accuracy over speed for complex tasks.

Use the new 'effort' parameter (low to max) to control the depth of reasoning Claude Opus 5 applies to your request.

Claude

The Scenario

You are using Claude Opus 5 to refactor a mission-critical legacy codebase where any logic error could result in a system failure. You need the model to use its maximum reasoning capability rather than providing a fast, surface-level answer.

Before & after

The old way

Users had limited control over how deeply a model thought, often relying on complex 'chain of thought' prompting to get better results. This manual prompt engineering could take 15–20 minutes to perfect.

With AI

By setting the level to 'max', you can force Opus 5 to dedicate more internal reasoning time to a problem in seconds. This ensures higher accuracy for capability-critical work.

The Prompt

{
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "thinking": {
    "type": "enabled",
    "budget_tokens": 16000
  },
  "effort": "max",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "[INSERT_COMPLEX_LOGIC_OR_CODING_PROBLEM]"
    }
  ]
}

Claude Opus 5 introduces 'effort' as the primary control mechanism. For tasks where precision and deep reasoning are non-negotiable, set the effort to 'max'. Note that if you use 'max' or 'xhigh', you cannot disable the 'thinking' feature.

Source

Claude Platform release notes - Claude Platform Docs
"Effort is the primary control for steering Claude Opus 5... with 'max' for capability-critical work."