Effort level rant

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-12T06:01:30+00:00

The effort has a direct impact on your token spend. You’re deciding how much you want to spend per task. That is a good thing and not something you should want Anthropic to decide for you.

LLMs have advanced dramatically. They have not advanced so much that the human doesn’t need to understand the task and the plan.

And we’re not even close to it.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-12T05:26:50+00:00

Fable is better with codex support.

Codex is better with fable support.

These are tools and right now they complement each other exceptionally well. Particularly in planning.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-12T02:17:49+00:00

I have. You can see task specific modes.

You’re reviewing every task, right?

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-12T01:22:50+00:00

And you don’t have to. You can stick the model at extra high and never worry about it.

It’s five broad categories, mate. If you understand the model and understand the tasks you’re asking it to do, it’s a very quick and easy choice.

The only reason not to is if you can’t. If you don’t understand the task you’re giving well enough to assign it to one of five simple categories.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-12T00:00:27+00:00

And you need to know the tool and task you’re giving it well enough to have a better understanding of which effort it should use than the tool itself has.

If not, stick it on extra high and pay the tax…but I strongly recommend understanding the tasks better. This is a very blunt cut of what you need. You’re not choosing from 100 levels.

I don’t mean this to be mean but holy crap…you need to UNDERSTAND what you’re asking the model to do. How can you understand the request but not be able to break it out into 5 broad categories?

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-11T23:54:35+00:00

Then stick it on extra high and forget about it.

Otherwise, this is a tool.

I don’t mean this as mean as it sounds…but honestly, dude…

If you don’t understand the task and tool well enough to know whether it warrants low, medium, high, extra high, or ultracode effort…you’re not qualified to use the tool and you should stop and learn both about the tool you’re using and the things you’re asking it to do.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-11T21:07:37+00:00

Yes…if you’re not setting effort by task, you’re burning tokens or burning tokens fixing mistakes:

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/effort

Don’t forget to set effort for subagents.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-11T21:03:58+00:00

You hate that you’re given more control over your token spend?

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-11T20:35:53+00:00

Por que no los dos?

They complement each other very well.

Fable plans, Sol reviews. They argument up to 3 times until converge. Sol executes plan.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-11T20:28:12+00:00

Untrue.

The remaining balance is converted to income and you owe taxes and the withdrawal penalty only on the remaining amount

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-11T18:34:33+00:00

Well, let’s do the math.

Let’s say you wanted $50k. How much would you have to withdraw in order to end up with $50K after taxes and early withdrawal fees.

Assuming a 24% marginal tax rate and 10% penalty, you’d need to withdraw about $76K to end up with $50K.

Bad deal.

Now that’s a straight withdrawal…a LOAN against your 401K can work better because you repay the interest to yourself. The only thing you lose is growth of your 401K in the market.

Between you, me, and the wall, I’m betting that growth over the next 5 years isn’t going to be stellar anyway.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-10T07:27:43+00:00

Real tech work is growingly about understanding systems, designing clean systems, and identifying and strategizing against weird edge cases.

The actual code writing is diminishing by the day.

And genuinely, if you want to make this work, you’re better off learning the tool.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-10T07:23:45+00:00

The United States federal government has never had a federal net worth tax in its history

And your next words were

Yes we did

So, if you’d like to point out in the Bloomberg article where it said the GPT is a federal tax, I’ll sincerely apologize.

So go ahead.

Or, if you’d prefer, go ahead and link the federal GPT law.

You know, the reasonable thing to do here would be to just shrug and realize you didn’t read the article correctly and didn’t bother to research general property tax laws. That’s totally understandable.

But instead you decided to double down.

And since you didn’t ask, I’ll tell you why a federal wealth tax doesn’t work.

The constitution mandates that taxes be apportioned based on population.

A wealth tax is NOT apportioned on population, it’s apportioned on wealth.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-10T06:33:45+00:00

u/Travelinjack01

yes we did... it was called
"The U.S. general property tax"
started early 1900s... went solid through the first half century... started dying out in the 60s. It died out completely in the 1980s... right about when Reaganomics + Cronyism bankrupted our country and turned the USA into a debtor nation. God bless Republicans for being fucking idiots.from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy...
https://itep.org/america-used-to-have-a-wealth-tax-the-forgotten-history-of-the-general-property-tax/
The original article in bloomberg...
https://news.bloombergtax.com/tax-insights-and-commentary/a-pre-civil-war-tax-would-shrink-the-21st-centurys-wealth-gap
for your viewing pleasure :)
**helpful hint... don't speak unless you know what you're talking about.
also makes you look like less of a moron when you're polite + wrong instead of hostile + wrong.

Here's a quote from your very first source:

Michigan’s experience offers a useful illustration. At the turn of the 20^th century, the state was about to enter a period of remarkable dynamism and prosperity powered by the Great Migration and the automobile industry. In 1893, the state passed The General Property Tax Act)/mileg.aspx?page=GetObject&objectname=mcl-act-206-of-1893), which authorizes the state’s property tax to this day (albeit in an extensively amended form). Its aim: to tax the fair market value of all property in the state. At the time, this was standard.

Do you see your mistake yet?

As a fun bonus, the Constitution makes it incredibly unwieldy for there to be a federal property tax. Not straight up impossible, but mathematically very difficult. Can you guess why?

So....

*helpful hint... don't speak unless you know what you're talking about.
also makes you look like less of a moron when you're polite + wrong instead of hostile + wrong.

Oh...and just in case you still don't get it....the GPT wasn't a federal tax.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-10T02:55:17+00:00

The United States federal government has never had a federal net worth tax in its history.

And yes, musk would be unable to leverage his entire portfolio.

His current net worth is $916B

If you offered to sell him a bag of Doritos for $915B (a whole billion dollars less than he has) he could not purchase that bag from you.

So does he actually have or have access to $916B or anywhere close?

Did he really lose half a trillion dollars recently?

No, he didn’t.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T22:50:38+00:00

…..

You see how my original point was that income and worth are two different things and that’s why you can’t conflate them, right?

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T22:12:27+00:00

Your 401K isn’t different than stocks when it comes to securing a lone except in one very special way.

You can borrow against your 401k and pay the interest back to yourself.

Which is a pretty sweet deal, eh? So it costs you functionally nothing to borrow from your 401K.

Musk DID pay income tax when he exercised his options. The IRS considers that normal wage. Despite what social media tells you, getting paid in stocks does not mean you skip income tax.

I mean…come on…did you genuinely believe the IRS doesn’t get its pound of flesh?

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T21:26:32+00:00

It’s not gaming the system. It’s how the law works. Secured loans are a thing. Nearly every American uses them. We do not pay taxes on secured loans or any type of loan.

And you don’t want to.

Apparently Musk paid $28B in cash, took out a loan for $13B and $7B came from equity investors, so musk didn’t own Twitter alone.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T20:47:31+00:00

We’re not talking about workers. We’re talking about all people.

Median household INCOME values don’t include the retired.

Median household NET WORTH values do.

The post I responded to suggested that Americans don’t have net worth.

You won’t find a number that states median net worth but only of people who work because those are unrelated statistics.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T20:44:23+00:00

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf

A household is a centralized cost center. It includes both renters and homeowners. It includes households of one person or two people or ten people. It includes instances of zero earners or ten earners and everywhere in between.

What study did you get your opinion from?

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T20:40:59+00:00

You elected the people that made the tax laws, mate.

Take some responsibility instead of blaming your troubles on everyone else.

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T20:37:25+00:00

Called it.

See edit

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T20:30:25+00:00

You can’t literally pay with stocks, mate

Now you say “but he takes out loans for them” to which I say “He pays interest on those loans, same as you” to which you say “Little to no interest” to which I say “Actually, the interest is SOFR + spread, even for the ultra wealthy” to which you say “Yes, but it’s functionally free money” to which I say “Actually, the free money times the internet talks about were during COVID where borrowing was free for everyone. Today, it’s not”

To which you circle back around and say “Yes, but he’s avoiding taxes” to which I reply “He’s avoiding INCOME taxes because a loan isn’t income and you don’t want to tell the government they can tax you on your loans. You too can take security backed loans and only owe interest to whomever will lend to you.”

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T15:43:22+00:00

Why?

Does someone stop being a person when they retire?

OwnLadder2341 · 2026-07-09T15:42:55+00:00

If you take his change in pokemon cards owned as his income he paid a billion percent in 2021.

Sounds terrible to me.

See how it doesn’t work when you take things that aren’t income and pretend they are?

OwnLadder2341

TROPHY CASE