Claude Code Effort Levels A/B Test: What Reduced Effort Means for Coding Agents
Anthropic is quietly A/B testing reduced default effort levels in Claude Code, and the change does not make the coding agent dumber — it makes it less proactive. Effort controls how much autonomous work Claude performs per turn (reading files, running tests, double-checking its own output) before responding or asking for context. When the default drops, you get faster, cheaper turns that skip deep investigation, which is fine for scoped tasks but can silently degrade complex multi-file refactors. ...