Claude Opus 4.8: New AI Effort Control Revealed

Summary

Claude Opus 4.8 has launched, boasting improvements over its predecessor, 4.7, and even GPT 5.5 in many benchmark categories. A key new feature is the 'effort' control, allowing users to adjust how much processing power Claude dedicates to a task, impacting speed and cost. This slider ranges from low effort for faster, cheaper results, to high, max, and ultra code for more complex tasks. While benchmarks look impressive, the speaker advises taking them with a grain of salt, emphasizing that model performance is use-case dependent. A significant focus for 4.8 is increased 'honesty' and self-correction, addressing user complaints from 4.7 about the model giving inaccurate progress reports or making unsupported claims. New 'dynamic workflows' in Claude Code also enable tackling larger problems. Users are encouraged to experiment with the effort lever, as the difference between low and high effort can feel like a completely different model. Additionally, prompting advice includes focusing on telling the AI what to do rather than what not to do, and providing context or the 'why' behind instructions for better adherence. Opus 4.8 also defaults to reasoning before calling tools and calibrates response length based on task complexity, aiming for more efficient and collaborative interactions.