Anthropic effort settings and benchmark data offer a practical guide for choosing Sonnet vs. Opus
seh0872 · reddit · 2026-07-24
Anthropic effort settings and benchmark data offer a practical guide for choosing Sonnet vs. Opus
A Reddit post collates a useful set of notes for people building AI teams or agent workflows with Claude. It explains that Anthropic’s effort ladder is low / medium / high / xhigh / max, and that the API default is high. It also notes that effort changes behavior across the whole request, not just reasoning tokens, because lower effort reduces tool calls too.
The post then compares Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8 across several benchmarks, including:
- SWE-bench Pro: 63.2% vs. 69.2%
- Terminal-Bench 2.1: 80.4% vs. 74.2–82.7% depending on source
- OSWorld-Verified: 81.2% vs. about 83%
- GDPval-AA v2: 1,618 Elo vs. 1,615 Elo
It also highlights a more actionable signal from Anthropic: Opus 4.8 is reportedly about 4× less likely than Opus 4.7 to let code flaws pass unremarked. The overall takeaway is that benchmark deltas are only part of the story; model behavior under agentic coding and review loops may matter more for real projects.
Related event: Opus 5 Coding Paradox: Higher Reasoning Leads to Lower Scores(13 posts)→
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