Claude Opus 4.7 in Claude Code: xhigh Effort and the /effort Slider

Claude Code Week 16 (April 13–17, 2026) made Claude Opus 4.7 the default on Max and Team Premium, introduced a new xhigh effort level, and shipped a /effort slider to dial reasoning depth interactively. This is the single biggest model-side change of the spring.

If you have been driving Claude Code on autopilot, the change is mostly invisible — things just feel sharper. If you are paying attention, the new effort levels reshape how you spend reasoning budget across the day.

Key Takeaways

• Claude Opus 4.7 is the new default model on Max and Team Premium plans as of v2.1.105 (Week 16, April 2026).
• xhigh effort is a new effort level above high, recommended as the default setting for most coding work.
• /effort is an interactive slider for dialing reasoning depth without leaving the conversation.
• Hooks (added in Week 19) can read the active level via effort.level and $CLAUDE_EFFORT to scale their behaviour.
• The Opus 4.7 family ID is claude-opus-4-7 (with a 1M-context variant claude-opus-4-7[1m]).
• Lower effort levels are still the right choice for fast, low-stakes interactions — speed matters too.

The Effort Hierarchy

Claude Code now exposes a graduated effort scale:

low → medium → high → xhigh

Each level allocates more internal reasoning budget. xhigh is the new "this is real work, take the time you need" setting. Anthropic's guidance is that xhigh is the right default for most coding work — not a special escalation.

You can set effort persistently or per-session:

# Set default in config
claude config set effort xhigh

# Override for one invocation
claude --effort xhigh "Refactor the auth module to use better-auth"

# Use the interactive slider mid-session
/effort

What xhigh Actually Changes

The user-visible differences when you switch from high to xhigh:

• Longer first response on complex tasks. Often 1.5–3x the time-to-first-token.
• Less mid-task backtracking. The model commits to a plan more decisively because it considered more alternatives upfront.
• Better tool-use trajectories. When the agent is reasoning about which tool to call next, xhigh produces noticeably more coherent chains.
• Improved adherence to long context. On large CLAUDE.md files or sprawling project context, xhigh is less likely to drop a critical constraint.

When xhigh does not help:

• Simple edits where the answer is obvious.
• Fast iterative work where you are doing the thinking.
• Conversational interactions ("what's the syntax for X").

For those, drop to high or medium and your wall-clock latency improves dramatically with no quality penalty.

The /effort Slider

/effort mid-session opens a small inline UI that lets you pick a level without leaving the conversation. The slider shows:

• The current level.
• A short description of what each level is best for.
• Approximate latency multiplier vs medium.

/effort
┌────────────────────────────────┐
│ low     ── medium              │
│         ↑                      │
│         high   ← xhigh         │
│                                │
│ xhigh: deepest reasoning;      │
│ recommended for most coding.   │
│ ~2.5x latency vs medium.       │
└────────────────────────────────┘

The pragmatic pattern: start a session at xhigh for planning and architecture, drop to high for routine implementation, drop to medium for very fast iterations on something you have already figured out.

Opus 4.7 in the Model Family

Claude Opus 4.7 sits at the top of the Claude 4.X family. The IDs you may see:

• claude-opus-4-7 — standard 200k context.
• claude-opus-4-7[1m] — 1M-context variant for very long codebases.
• claude-sonnet-4-6 — Sonnet 4.6, the default on lower-tier plans.
• claude-haiku-4-5 — Haiku 4.5, for fast/cheap.

Opus 4.7 is the model that benefits most from xhigh. Sonnet 4.6 also accepts the level but the marginal gain is smaller.

For agentic work that calls Opus 4.7 via the Claude API (not Claude Code), the same principles apply — see the Anthropic SDK migration patterns for the API-side picture.

Cost vs Latency vs Quality

A loose mental model for choosing effort:

The cost story is plan-dependent: on Max or Team Premium, xhigh is included in the plan. On usage-based pricing, xhigh consumes more tokens; the /usage command (introduced in Week 16) shows where your budget is going.

How Effort Flows Through Hooks and Plugins

A small but important addition from Week 19's plugin update: hooks can read the active effort level.

# pre-commit hook
if [ "$CLAUDE_EFFORT" = "xhigh" ]; then
  npm run test:full
else
  npm run test:fast
fi

This is the right pattern: at xhigh, the user has signaled "spend time on this." Hooks should match. At lower effort, hooks should stay fast.

Plugins can declare effort-aware behaviour in their manifests so users do not have to wire this themselves.

Routines and Auto Mode at xhigh

Two other Week 16/13 features interact with effort:

• Routines (Week 16) — templated cloud agents on a schedule, GitHub event, or API call. Routines can pin an effort level so your nightly review runs at xhigh regardless of your default.
• Auto mode (Week 13, hardened in Week 19 with hard-deny) — the permission classifier. At xhigh, auto mode is more conservative because the underlying reasoning is more confident; that combination matters when delegating.

Practical Adoption

Three things to do this week if you are on Max or Team Premium:

1. Run /effort and pick xhigh for one session of real work. See if the change in trajectory is worth the latency for your kind of tasks.
2. Configure effort-aware hooks for your slowest tests. Save your slow suite for xhigh runs; keep the fast suite always on.
3. Pin Routines to xhigh. Anything you run unattended should default to the best reasoning you have available — you are not waiting for it.

Bringing It Back Together

The model is better. The effort scale is more honest about that. The slider makes it easy to spend reasoning where it matters and save latency where it does not. xhigh is the new "real work" gear; medium is still the right gear for casual interactions. The trick is knowing which is which.

For the broader 2026 picture, see OpenClaw vs Hermes vs Claude Code.

Sources

• Claude Code "What's New" — https://code.claude.com/docs/en/whats-new
• Claude Code Week 16 digest — https://code.claude.com/docs/en/whats-new/2026-w16
• Anthropic Claude model overview — https://docs.anthropic.com/claude
• Related: Claude Code Plugins from .zip and URLs
• Related: Claude Code /ultrareview Public Preview
• Related: My AI Dev Workflow in 2026