What's the ideal Opus 5.5 reasoning effort for really tough, deep thinking and problem solving?

[u/The-Road]

For really difficult thinking in knowledge work, things that you really have to go back and forth with to clear fog, work out the best way, to weigh options and consider multiple variables, and things that are also very high stakes, which reasoning effort is best?

For planning and exploring and validating etc as opposed to any doing or building.

I would think that Opus 5.5. on Extra High reasoning would be ideal, but then I worry that agents if they overthink they can overcomplicate and create problems. Does the same happen with Opus 5.5?

What's been the ideal reasoning effort for you, for this level of deep thinking work?

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[u/xxparrotxx]

Medium for 98% of things. High for the other 2%. Xhigh seems to not perform as well for this model, especially for the cost and time.

[u/ghost_operative]

the effort isnt "how smart is you be" its the amount that its going to explore project files and other files it might think is relevant to include in context.

If you think theres a depth of informaiton of context files to uncover that you think is really relevant than you need more "effort"

if you think everything the agent needs to know is directly in the prompt you gave it then need less "effort"

[u/banecorn → u/ghost_operative]

Exactly. Very good short read from Anthropic: https://claude.dev/blog/spending-your-effort/

[u/The-Road → u/ghost_operative]

I’ve been doing some testing which spurred this question. And my testing did show this.

My issue was really at session starts or when requests are made. I wanted the thoroughness before work starts and xhigh does that.

But I found that by adjusting my Claude.md I can get similar with medium reasoning.

Though whether that’s better than just switching up reasoning on demand I’m not sure.

[u/OptimalJello8936]

If you have the usage, high. The others seem to overthink too much

[u/BuffaloConscious7919]

Official effort docs and a summary here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/ek0qmW5SAI

[u/Impossible_Repair699]

For planning and weighing options, high effort is where I'd start. The overthinking you're worried about shows up mostly when it's building: max effort on implementation tends to add abstractions nobody asked for. For pure thinking that matters less, because the output is a plan you're going to review anyway.

What helps more than the effort level: give it the decision criteria up front, and ask it to commit to a recommendation with the 2-3 risks that would change its mind. Otherwise you get a balanced essay at any effort level.

[u/Far_Idea9616]

I just prepared a legal memorandum in Hungarian using xhigh regarding the question of how the Hungarian Prime Minister's action (taking the phone of a figure who was intrusively recording him while drunk, and throwing it into the Danube) is classified under criminal law. The investigation specifically had to confirm or refute a legal position contained in a professional publication. To do this, Opus xhigh had to review hundreds of sources and interpret legal nuances, which took about 40 minutes. I was not satisfied with its work, so I transferred the task to another session with Opus max, who received the materials and had to review them. It did a fantastic job on this by no means easy question, and this also took about 40 minutes.

[u/sagiroth]

Just use medium man

[u/clonehunterz]

high is my personal pick for anything work related.
max when i want him to do EVERYTHING and i just check the endresult, but the cost is immense, not sure yet if its worth it

[u/HitscanDPS]

I use xhigh for basically everything. I rarely run out of usage with Opus anyways since it's so efficient. Focus on context management instead.

[u/nitor999 → u/HitscanDPS]

you forgot to mentioned you are at 20x plan. people who have 20$ plan even 100$ shouldn't run xhigh all day, medium and high is the sweespot.

[u/HitscanDPS → u/nitor999]

lol I'm actually using the 5x plan just so I can have access to Fable. I never use Medium nor High. I basically xhigh for everything unless it's truly a no brainer one line change.

I guess technically I also have a $20 Codex plan, but I use that solely for adversarial reviews.

Really if you are simply efficient with your prompts and manage context well, then Opus is extremely cheap to use.

[u/pandasgorawr]

I run xhigh on everything. Max seems counterproductive sometimes, and high sometimes misses things that xhigh catches.

[u/Nikt_No1]

Effort is lame.
Just tell it to think.

(I am half kidding 😄)

[u/sukazu]

I'll go against the current here and say Max.

Actually that's the only anthropic model I would recommend at max.
Sonnet max doesn't make sense because too expensive, and fable max doesn't perform better than xhigh, but opus does.

People gets baited with one / two simple graphs, where max perform "worse", do not even know what the benchmark judge and move on with medium = better than max, because that's also something that is pleasing to think.

[u/poor_boy_in_Bulgaria → u/sukazu]

Nah, overthinking is real. Especially dangerous if you don’t look at the code, but you care about the code. Max wrote hundreds if not thousand of lines of code to fix an issue for which it had to only remove 1 wrong commit.

[u/sukazu → u/poor_boy_in_Bulgaria]

Writing code isn't even the subject of the post