Using Opus 5 'Low' is better than expected
On and off, I have been using Claude Code for several months, and in all that time I never ran any model below Extra High effort. It always felt like if I use with lower effort, the model will mess up with my existing code. Even when Opus 5 launched, I kept it at Max without thinking twice.
For the last few days, I've been running Opus 5 at Low instead, and I'm loving it so far. It's faster, and it consumes noticeably fewer tokens. I'm working on a huge project right now, so not running out of limits halfway through the day matters a lot more to me than squeezing out the last bit of reasoning.
Claude Code is the tool I use almost entirely for frontend and design work, and that's where this holds up best. For UI design work, the difference between the higher efforts and Low is negligible – I can't really tell which one wrote the component. Higher effort now feels like overkill for most of what I do day to day.
So my default has flipped. I start at Low and only bump the effort, to Medium or High but almost never to Extra High or Max up when a task actually asks for it, like a tricky bug or a change spanning a lot of files.
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