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2nd June 2026

Draft: This is a draft post. Please do not share this URL with anyone else.

I've been a bit disappointed with Opus 4.8 in the Claude.ai app - it seemed to answer extremely slowly, massively over-thinking everything.

Then I noticed I've been running it with the thinking effort set to "Max". I dropped that back down to the suggested default of "High" and it's behaving much, much better.

This is a note by Simon Willison, posted on 2nd June 2026.

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