PRODUCTION SCENARIO
Your orchestrator on Claude Opus 5 fans out simple lookups, fetch a record and extract three fields, to 20 subagents per request. Subagent latency and token spend dominate the bill, and the orchestrator's own reasoning quality has to stay where it is.
How should effort be set across the orchestrator and its subagents?
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Answer: Keep the orchestrator at high effort and run the subagents at low effort
Low effort is the most efficient level for simpler tasks that need speed and low cost, which is exactly what these fan-out subagents do, while high effort stays right for complex reasoning and agentic orchestration. Adaptive is a thinking mode rather than an effort value, so it cannot be passed here at all.
Official Source: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/effort ↗