Claude Code xhigh Effort: The Optimal Default for Agentic Work — Start Here, Drop to High for Cost Control, Reserve Max for Architectural Migrations

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With Opus 4.7, Claude Code introduced five effort tiers (low/medium/high/xhigh/max) and made xhigh the default. xhigh controls reasoning depth, agentic persistence, and tool call appetite — deeper exploration than high but without max's full token spend. The cost-effective pattern: use high as the floor for intelligence-sensitive work, xhigh for complex refactors and multi-file dependency resolution, and max only when inter-module reasoning is critical. Switchable via /effort or --effort flag.