Jev sets effort per message, exposing Opus 5.5's default downgrade
Opus 5.5's default effort dropped from high to medium, which went unnoticed until Jev set effort explicitly on every message; the post also lists migration errors and a cache trap.
OPUS 5.5 IS MAKING YOUR AGENT DUMBER RIGHT NOW AND IT WILL NEVER TELL YOU. JEV CAUGHT IT. The default effort on Opus 5.5 dropped from high to medium. If your agent never set effort explicitly, it is now reasoning at a lower setting than the one you tested it on. No error, no warning, every health check still green. Jev sets effort on every single message, so the requests that went through it never changed. The ones that relied on the default did. That gap is how it showed up. The rest of the migration is loud. Each of these returns a 400 on the first call: > thinking: disabled, now rejected. Drop the field and set effort > tool_choice any and tool, removed. Use auto + strict > computer_20251124, retired. Use computer_toolset_20260801 > editing above a thinking block, rejected. Append only, or drop_block You will find all four in five minutes. The effort change you will not find at all. The cache has its own quiet trap. Hop Opus 5.5 to Sonnet 5 and back and a session that cost 3.32 costs 4.36, +31%, because Sonnet cannot read Opus's reasoning. Change effort at the top of a request or switch fast to standard mid-session and the cache is gone again. Jev picks speed once on turn one and sets effort per message, so it survives. The upgrade is still worth it. $4 / $20 per 1M instead of $5 / $25, cache reads at $0.20 instead of $0.50, and 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against 57.9% for GPT-6 Astra. Write effort into every request before you touch the model ID. The default stopped meaning what you think.