effort-calibrator
Installation
SKILL.md
Effort Calibrator
On Fable 5, effort is the primary dial trading intelligence against latency and cost. Defaults that were right for earlier models are usually wrong here: Fable 5 at lower effort frequently beats earlier models at xhigh, so over-provisioning effort wastes money and time without adding quality.
Starting points by workload
| Workload | Start at |
|---|---|
| Routine transforms, classification, short edits, chat, subagents | medium (try low if latency matters) |
| Most analysis and writing | high (the general default) |
| Coding and agentic/tool-heavy work | high (the API and Claude Code default on Fable 5) — even for workloads that ran at xhigh on earlier Opus models; escalate to xhigh only for the most capability-sensitive tasks |
| Hardest capability-sensitive work: large migrations, multi-day autonomous runs, novel research | xhigh |
Frontier problems only, where evals show headroom above xhigh and token spend is unconstrained |
max |
The signal for max is evals showing headroom above xhigh on your actual task: on most workloads it adds significant cost for small gains and can tip into overthinking.