70 Hours With Opus 5.5 in Claude Code: Medium Effort Beats Max, Keep Context Under 400k
EXM7777 · x · 2026-10-05
After 70+ hours building with Opus 5.5 inside Claude Code, the author distills a concrete playbook:
- Set effort to medium — higher settings never produced better outputs
- Keep the context window under 400k tokens; use only a global claude.md
- Run one main chat as a router that spawns per-project threads in git worktrees for easy versioning
- Lean on subagents to keep main context clean: you own the vision, workers do research and coding
- Skip plan mode in favor of /grill-me or Compound engineering plugins
- Start projects with heavy research and a pile of references, then trust Opus to build overnight
- Disable 90% of your skills, and have Opus maintain a scope-mapping artifact updated at each milestone
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