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DisclaimerUnofficial, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Nearly all of this is read straight out of what ships: npm bundles, captured prompts, published docs. Anthropic's own notes go in verbatim, marked as theirs. The rest is my reading, and every entry carries the strings behind it. If one looks wrong, vote it down and say why.

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Claude Code v2.0.46

Effort Level Configuration

What: Control Claude's reasoning effort/intensity for tasks through multiple configuration methods

How to use:

# Via environment variable
export CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL=high
claude

# Supported values: "low", "medium", "high", or numeric values
export CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL=75
claude

# Disable with "unset"
export CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL=unset
claude

Details:

  • Configuration priority: CLI flags (highest) → environment variable → settings file (lowest)
  • Set via CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL environment variable
  • Configure in settings file with effortLevel field
  • Supports string presets: "low", "medium", "high"
  • Supports numeric values (integers)
  • Use "unset" to explicitly disable effort configuration
  • Integrates with Claude API's output_config.effort parameter using beta flag effort-2025-11-24
  • Evidence: New function a10() at line 341081 retrieves configuration from multiple sources; function nR3() at line 491217 sets API parameters; replaces empty stub uR3() at line 491090 from v2.0.45

See this entry in the whole of v2.0.46 →