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Benchmarks say turn effort up. On real work, it went the other way. I ran Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol at low, medium, high, xhigh and max effort on six real changes from a production monorepo: 300 runs. Opus peaked at medium, the Claude Code default, and reproduced it exactly on a second day. Above medium it started breaking tests. More effort never made any model more careful.
READBoris Cherny, who built Claude Code, says engineering, product, design and data science are melting into one role, and what's left is five archetypes: Prototyper, Builder, Sweeper, Grower, Maintainer. I read the list and realised I'm all five, because building solo with agents leaves no one to hand a phase to. The framework is thirty years old. What's new is that it just became the primary axis instead of the secondary one.
READOpus 5 writes 510 words where Opus 4.5 wrote 158, with 2.3 times the em dashes and twice the 'load-bearing'. Arena measured it, Hacker News named it, Reddit downgraded over it. Anthropic's answer arrived in Fable 5.1's prompting docs: a paragraph defining 'mannered prose', with the model's own tics as the examples, for you to paste into your prompt. The vendor wrote the style guide against its own model, and shipped it as your job.
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