Anthropic's Opus 5.5 prompting guide: don't max out thinking effort on every task
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-10-29
Anthropic released a prompting best-practices guide for Claude Opus 5.5, and this thread walks through its 11 tips. The headline advice: don't use maximum thinking effort for everything.
- Start at medium effort: Opus 5.5 at medium effort matches or outperforms Opus 5 at high effort on many tasks — usually the best quality/speed trade-off
- Test low effort for speed on tasks that don't need deep analysis
- Reserve xhigh/max for cases where you've verified better results: complex research, large multi-step tasks, hard reasoning
Related event: Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 5.5 Prompting Guide with 11 Best Practices(25 posts)→
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