Claude’s skills and slash commands just picked up a small but meaningful control surface: an “effort level” setting that can be specified per command. In a weekend update, Lydia Hallie shared that this setting controls how long the model thinks before answering and overrides the session default, making it possible to tune latency and deliberation on a task-by-task basis. The announcement was posted on X as a short feature note.
Per-command “effort” as a practical lever
The key detail is the scoping: effort can be set inside skills/slash commands, rather than forcing a single choice for an entire session. That changes how teams can structure agent workflows, especially when tasks vary widely in complexity and urgency.
Several replies framed it as a straightforward way to split work: low effort for quick lookups or boilerplate, and max effort for architectural or high-stakes decisions—without the overhead of moving work into separate sessions to “reset” the thinking mode.
Others immediately connected the feature to cost control. One developer noted it could “save a ton of tokens,” and another suggested this kind of dial is an “unlock” for balancing mundane recurring tasks against the ones that deserve deeper reasoning.
Questions developers immediately asked
The replies also surfaced the gaps that tend to matter once a toggle becomes part of daily tooling:
- Definitions: what, concretely, separates low/medium/high, and whether “low” has a specific meaning beyond “faster.”
- Mechanics: whether the per-command effort setting overrides or stacks with the session default (multiple people asked this explicitly).
- Mapping: whether effort corresponds directly to an internal “extended thinking token budget,” or if it’s a separate control.
- Automation: whether skills could dynamically adjust effort based on scope, rather than relying on manual selection.
Not all feedback was purely technical. A few replies questioned whether the growing set of knobs risks adding configuration overhead, while others joked about the pace of weekend shipping.
Docs, changelog, and RSS
One practical thread in the discussion was about discoverability: features like this often travel fastest through social posts. Hallie replied that there’s an official changelog and RSS feed in the docs, linking to: https://t.co/wg0FQ1YTem
Original source: https://x.com/lydiahallie/status/2035426943777263751
