A walkthrough of how effort levels work in Claude's Opus 4.7 model, based on a Reddit post. Key points: effort is a behavioral signal controlling adaptive reasoning depth, tool call appetite, response length, and agentic autonomy — not a strict token budget. Opus 4.7 defaults to 'extra high' effort on all plans including Pro, while Opus 4.6 defaulted to 'medium' on Pro/Max plans, explaining why some users perceived a quality drop. Low effort Opus 4.7 roughly equals medium effort Opus 4.6. Importantly, context quality can matter more than effort level — a well-contextualized low-effort prompt often beats a poorly-contextualized max-effort one. Opus 4.7 also uses 10–35% more tokens than 4.6, so matching effort level to task complexity (e.g., Sonnet low for simple tasks, Opus max for architecture/security) is important for managing token costs.
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