medium
A Claude Code settings key, read out of the shipped bundle. No mined inventory carries it: everything below comes from what this site has written about it.
Workflow size now defaults to medium, and an admin policy setting overrides whatever you chose.
Not Anthropic's. This is the line from the earliest changelog entry here that named it, v2.1.219.
In the changelogs
14Releases whose published page names medium.
-
v2.1.293
Effort levels are now defined in one shared list
Claude Code now keeps one shared list of effort levels: low, medium, high, xhigh and max
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.290
/code-review mediumnow runs the high-effort recipe on most modelsOn every model without its own
/code-reviewrow, Opus 5.5 included,mediumnow runs the eight-angle high recipe instead of a single pass.high,xhighand Opus 5 are unchanged.found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.285
Your git log format setting no longer affects Claude Code's git commands
Claude Code now runs its own git commands with format.pretty=medium so a custom log format cannot break how it reads the output
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.281
Bundled model-preset config: chat preset thinking effort for claude-opus-5-5 set to medium
A bundled model config now lists claude-opus-5-5 at medium thinking effort for the chat preset, alongside claude-opus-5 at high
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.248
Reasoning effort levels and their aliases
Reasoning effort accepts low through max, with med and ultracode as aliases.
named in this entry, found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.239
New
modelSettingsconfig key holds per-model effortA new modelSettings config key stores an effort level per model, from low to xhigh.
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.219
Workflow size guideline gets a default and a policy override
Workflow size now defaults to medium, and an admin policy setting overrides whatever you chose.
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.126
/effortselections are now persisted to user settingsfound in this entry's text
-
v2.1.111
New "xhigh" Effort Level
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.76
/effortSlash Commandfound in this entry's text
-
v2.1.72
Effort Level "max" and Persistence
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.67
Opus 4.6 Medium Effort Default Extended to Max and Team Plans
found in this entry's text
-
v2.1.38
Effort Level Control
found in this entry's text
-
v2.0.44
Experimental Reasoning Effort Control
found in this entry's text
First cited
0No release's published evidence quotes this name. The ledger indexes the Evidence lines of every changelog on this site, so this says nobody here has ever quoted it; it says nothing about how old the name is.
Presence across releases
0The miner has never read a build containing this name. It is here because a changelog entry of ours names it, which is evidence that it existed and not evidence of which releases carried it. The inventory starts at v2.1.138 and everything older than that was never mined.
Read out of the published npm bundle release by release, and out of Anthropic's own documentation as this site captured it. Nothing on this page is a description anybody here wrote about what the settings key does. All settings keys.