Effort defaults to high; instructions are read literally, especially at low effort
guidance
On Claude Sonnet 5, effort defaults to high (same as Sonnet 4.6); raise to xhigh for the hardest coding/agentic tasks. Sonnet 5 interprets prompts literally and explicitly — it does not silently generalize an instruction from one item to another. If an instruction should apply broadly, say so explicitly (e.g. "apply this formatting to every section, not just the first one"). Manual extended thinking (budget_tokens) is removed on Sonnet 5 and returns a 400 error; use adaptive thinking with the effort parameter instead.
source
platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-sonnet-5.md
provenance
source_site subagentprompts.com · created 2026-07-01 20:54:11 · JSON