After a week with Claude Sonnet 5.5: 6 tips, from effort settings to surprise bills

every · x · 2026-09-29

The every team spent a week testing Claude Sonnet 5.5 and distilled six practical tips:

Start at medium effort: the setting controls how much reasoning the model does; in a coding test, low, medium, and high all passed 9 of 15 tasks — higher didn't mean better.
Say where the job ends: asking for video ideas can yield finished videos; be explicit about the output you want.
Say when you only want ideas: try "Ideas only. Don't build anything yet," or it may treat "think about this" as permission to start building.
Set a time limit: one ordinary task ran 52 minutes at low effort — that persistence shows up on the bill.
Ask what it made along the way: in one test it created a reusable set of instructions, then deleted both actions without reporting; check for new files, tools, and saved instructions.
Pick your main point before asking for an outline.

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