It's your responsibility to set an appropriate level of Thinking. For simple tasks, I use the instant model. As an approximation, the choice is proportional to the amount of time I want it spending on the task. Also, you can always ask it to respond succinctly.

Yep. I have not yet had a single good experience with Sol or the 5.6 models on a variety of harnesses and configurations. It overthinks, overcomplicates and often makes my code into an unmaintainable sludge. It'll usually take 5+ turns of steering to get it in the right direction.

I've found it to be great for planning code changes (or new projects). I use the superpowers plug-in which I think guides the planning.

Then I switch models (to luna) before implementation. I find this combo nearly always does what I want.

I also use a skill called ponytail, its goal is to keep things terse and edits small. It may have contributed to the successes above.

I like that skills are easy to try out, too.

I stopped using superpowers because it wanted to turn every tiny bug fix into a $37MM DOD project. I got effective results but it took ages. I may try again - I need to find a good way to run different profiles in my harness so I can easily shut it off. The default planning workflow in OMP is pretty good though.

I agree Luna is great for task execution, either as a sub-agent with Sol planning and coordinating or if the task is well defined and straightforward, but there are lots of models now that you can say that about.

I tell it not to use superpowers for small changes, for the same reason you say. (I often forget, though)

And yes, I sub in other coding models like DeepSeek. Mostly with good results.

I have the same setup you have, love it!

I've found it's worse for simple tasks too, and I have to give it stricter guidelines, and sometimes it doesn't follow the same patterns I've grown to expect. I've found using 5.6 (sol) is good for diagnosing issues though, especially in terms of optimization of some given path

You would probably get better results with Luna for the real simple tasks, or Sol with low thinking effort.

I find that I get exactly the effort that I asked for, which is pretty nice. The other side of that coin is that these are the least lazy models I’ve used so far. They will go on elaborate tangents to complete the task when I want them to.

any good best practice for effort selection on claude. I always use high as default.

Opus 4.8 on Low is similar in price and quality to Sonnet 5 on High, but much faster.

But otherwise I don’t use Claude anymore.