Deep Dive · XiaoHu Explains

The Claude Code team teaches you how to work these two knobs: one controls whether it "can," the other controls whether it "will do enough"

A ClaudeDevs long-form post pulls apart two settings that both feel like "make the answer better": switching models swaps which frozen weights you're using, while adjusting effort changes whether it's willing to read more files, run more tests, and verify more before handing back an answer
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This piece is a product-mechanics explainer written by a member of Anthropic's Claude Code team, not a third-party review. The "roughly 7x tokens" figure and the cost-curve charts in the piece are illustrative — the author explicitly states they aren't real benchmark data. The Fable / Opus / Sonnet role analogy is also the author's own framing. The five effort-tier names and positioning come from the official Effort API docs; the tier-by-tier "500 error on login" walkthrough is a teaching scenario meant to aid understanding, not a vendor's tier-by-tier recorded test.
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Two knobs that both look like they "make the answer better"

On July 8, 2026, Anthropic's developer account @ClaudeDevs published a long-form Claude Code post, written by Claude Code team member Lydia Hallie.

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