If your Claude Code output quality dropped recently and you can’t figure out why: Anthropic changed the default reasoning effort from high to medium for Max and Team subscribers in v2.1.68. Quick fix: claude --model claude-opus-4-6 --effort max Or permanent fix in ~/.claude/settings.json : { “effortLevel”: “max” } But max effort isn’t right for every tier. It burns tokens fast. Here’s what actually works after a few weeks of daily use: Also heads up: there’s a bug (#30726) where setting “max” in settings.json gets silently downgraded if you touch the /model UI during a session. I wrote a deeper breakdown with shell aliases and the full fix options here: https://llmx.tech/blog/how-to-change-claude-code-effort-level-best-settings-per-subscription-tier submitted by /u/dmytro_de_ch
Originally posted by u/dmytro_de_ch on r/ClaudeCode