How to Use Claude Effort Levels (Full Guide)

💼 Business owner or operator with a team? We build AI automation systems that cut costs and scale ops — done for you: https://ryanandmattdatascience.com/ai-consultant/ 🚀 Want to make money with AI skills? Join our free community — real projects, real client strategies, and the exact stack we use: https://www.skool.com/data-and-ai Yesterday Anthropic released Opus 4.8, and hidden in that release was a brand new feature for Claude Cowork and chat: effort levels. With effort, you can choose the thinking level of models like Opus and Sonnet — and it has a real impact on your token usage, speed, and reasoning quality. In this video I test the exact same prompt across all five effort levels (low, medium, high, extra high, and max) so you can see the differences for yourself. I also show you where to find the setting, what the Claude docs say about each level, a weird quirk I hope Anthropic changes, and exactly how much of my usage limit this burned on the $99 plan. The big takeaway: Opus 4.8 runs on HIGH effort by default, so you may be burning tokens and time on simple tasks that don't need it. Drop it to low and you could save both — but is it worth it? Let's find out TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Opus 4.8 drops a new feature: effort levels 00:42 - Why this matters (high is the default) 00:46 - Where to find effort levels in Claude 01:15 - Which models have effort (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) 01:35 - What the Claude docs say about each level 03:23 - The test: same prompt, every effort level 04:40 - Low effort result 05:33 - Medium effort result 06:24 - High effort result (the default) 07:25 - Extra high effort result 08:32 - Max effort result 10:25 - Ranking all five 10:42 - How much usage this burned ($100 plan) 11:08 - My recommendation 11:59 - The quirk: you can't change effort mid-session 12:49 - Wrap up OTHER SOCIALS: 🌐 Website & Blog: https://ryanandmattdatascience.com/ Ryan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-p-nolan/ Matt’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-payne-ceo/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/RyanMattDS *This is an affiliate program. We receive a small portion of the final sale at no extra cost to you.