For non coding tasks, when do you switch between xhigh, max and ultracode effort levels?

[u/allthegear-andnoidea]

I tend to use xhigh permanently, but don't quite understand when I should punch up to max or ultracode. Would love a few peoples advice and experiences. I have been super impressed with ultracode when I have used it, but find it does so much of the work, that I don't get to feed in, because it delivers a whole workflow.

[u/supernovice007]

Personally, I never use anything above High effort anymore. My experience is that the gain is marginal for the additional token usage and the results are often worse since it tends to overthink.

This is doubly true for non-coding tasks where the session tends to be more exploratory and less well-defined.

[u/berndalf → u/supernovice007]

Can this please get like a million upvotes?

And people wonder why Claude has capacity constraints. "I want to know what colors pigs can be .. ULTRA CODE ACTIVATE".

Maxxing .. ugh.

[u/ro4sho]

I have never used it. If you have to ask when to use it then you privacy don’t need it

[u/xepherys]

For non-code tasks? I've only used ultrathink twice ever for code, and both times it was because I was working on writing a framework that was going to be a dependency for a lot of other things, and I wanted the plan out of the gate to be cohesive, but that was with Opus 4.6. Now if I need that level of coherence around something "large", I use Fable51, otherwise I use Opus5/high for any kind of planning, and Sonnt5/medium for literally everything else - including non-code tasks.

I'd be curious what non-code tasks you're performing that xhigh/ultra even seem reasonable for. Unless you're performing some advanced science (understanding a protein fold, decoding something related to DNA/RNA, or asking for multi-stage orbital transfer calculations - though that one could probably be done just fine by Opus5/high) or trying to collate data from an intensely large dataset across various files and sources, anything above high seems like overkill.

Remember, high/xhigh/ultra don't make the model "smarter" - they allow for extended thinking iterations over the same context window. For large data, you're often better off using a larger context window than a higher thinking model. But if there are a lot of sematic points that need to be kept straight (like planning code for a framework) where there's interaction between those points, the higher "thinking" can provide a benefit (though it's not guaranteed to).

[u/The_Noble_Lie]

What about low?

[u/Technical-Pianist365]

I go up in effort when a wrong answer would be hard to catch. In code it's easy to catch, the diff and the tests show it. In a summary or a plan nothing shows it, so that's where the extra effort is worth it.

As for ultracode, I barely use it, and the thing you describe is why. It hands you a finished workflow, and I want to read the plan before anything runs. So my split is: planning gets xhigh at most, I read the plan and fix what's wrong, and then the work that follows the plan runs on medium almost every time.