Claude API · Shaping requests
Control how hard Claude thinks
Use adaptive thinking and set output_config.effort (low, medium, high, xhigh or max) to trade depth against cost and speed.
response = client.messages.create(
model="claude-opus-5-5",
max_tokens=16000,
thinking={"type": "adaptive", "display": "summarized"},
output_config={"effort": "high"},
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Solve this step by step..."}],
)
Official Claude API documentation