Opus 4.8 defaults to high effort, which we judge to be the best overall balance of quality and user experience. On coding tasks, this effort level spends a similar number of tokens as Opus 4.7’s default, but with better performance. Users can choose “extra” ( xhigh in Claude Code) or “max,” and the model will spend more tokens to get better results; we recommend using “extra” for difficult tasks and long-running asynchronous workflows. We have increased rate limits in Claude Code to accommodate the higher token usage of higher effort levels; users can select whichever makes sense for their particular project. I’m noticing max is very expensive on 4.8 compared to 4.7, because I just spent $10 reviewing a PR which would have been like $2-$5 on 4.7-max This is not a scientific test but in my usual workflows where I defaulted to max all the time previously (4.6,4.7) the $$$ usage wasn’t this high. What are you guys doing? submitted by /u/Sooribabu_Lavangam
Originally posted by u/Sooribabu_Lavangam on r/ClaudeCode
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