alt Hacker NewsWhile I appreciate, they publish this information, it's increasingly hard to keep track of it all. I've lost the mental model of how different models at different effort levels perform and what tasks they are good at.
In practice, I tend to just use the default on Claude Code that works well enough. But I wonder to what degree other users really play around with these settings to optimize for their project.
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I tend to run it on High and then step it up for problems where I'm noticing it struggles, bump it back down after. Sometimes I accidentally leave a session in Ultracode for a day and wonder why things are taking so long, but generally happy with the results.
Same boat as you, and my answer is "... Except when I ask and overall or checkup task that is specifically heavy or overseeing in which case I use the maximum level" which lately meant ultracode.
I'm not going to play around with thinking level every request because the goal is to make me save time not spend it in a different setting menu.
What I want is a harness that knows how to optimize this kind of thing for me.
Exactly this is my problem with all AI tools. I want someone else to create working tools for me so I can focus on my product. It is the same with other tools. I do not want to spent huge amounts of energy and time to setup my IDE, operating system or desk layout. I guess it is too early to have that now.
Just because it’s hard to keep track of doesn’t mean it’s not relevant.
Playing around with learning the differences is incredibly helpful to schedule on ones calendar weekly for an hour or two, while saving links throughout the week to try out.
Just use deepswe as a reference point.
It's almost like you want an automatically intelligent choice of your artificial intelligence.
Understandable frankly.
I always use Opus 4.8 at max effort for everything. The $20 subscription didn't have enough tokens, but the $100 one had too many of them. So now I just max out Opus in order to maintain 100% weekly utilization.