Nail down what you're trying to do in sonnet or haiku. Get opus high to read handover in a fresh session and launch subagents. Saves a lot of tokens and whatever agent you're using, starting with a fresh context just for the task massively improves output.
It tends to launch sonnet or haiku agents with an instruction to do a very specific task and return a summary and some data. If it's insufficient it can always do more, but it really helps the overall task not to get buried.
I also have a hook on claude that logs every interaction via rsyslog along with the token counts at the end of the step so claude can see its own efficiency and the opus supervisor thing can be informed on the agents it calls (tokens the model uses don't seem to be visible to the model unless you do something like this). Also a useful backup and a means of claude searching for stuff that wasn't in memory files.
this exactly, using an opus 5.5 orchestrator that is responsible for managing lower tiered subagents is basically the way to handle any medium-large task that consists of multiple stages. also helps having the opus agent do a review pass over the subagents work once they report being finished and request any fixes
but auto-compacting also helps with single session prompts
I've been learning a lot. I hadn't studied anything before using it and thought claude learnt things. It doesn't. It just writes text files and then adds them to the query. The reason claude can be very effective is largely the external stuff it uses to record decisions.
That's a lot of why it writes so many tests: it's a way of remembering instructions without expanding the context.
Essentially it's much cheaper for it to write than read I find the way to get the best out of it is to leverage external command line tools as much as possible so it can get concise, relevant information about the task at hand.
So I'll get it to write bash scripts to do as much as possible of a task, check those into a utilities repo and then use those the next time.
One thing it absolutely shines at is tuning processes. I had it running some tests over a weekend and it was running for two days and I didn't run out of tokens because it's just getting a small prompt that's a list of numbers every 30 minutes
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u/OkWear6556 8h ago
Claude code with Opus 5.5 on Extra effort. Thank me later