Lowering Opus 5 effort cuts reasoning tokens, not response length
heypearlai · x · 2026-07-29
- The thread says lowering Opus 5’s effort does not shorten answers; it mainly reduces reasoning tokens, while the final visible output stays roughly the same length.
- To make outputs shorter, the prompt must explicitly ask for a hard word cap and tell the model to skip preambles and closing summaries.
- It also warns that blanket instructions like “verify everything” can now just multiply cost, because Opus 5 already self-checks by default.
Related event: Claude Opus 5 Official Prompting Guide and Practical Tips(7 posts)→
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