A dial, not a switch

Anthropic put out a new model this morning — Claude Opus 5. The headline is a knob.

You can now set how hard it thinks. Low, medium, high. Same model either way, but you decide how much effort it spends before it answers. Low is quick and cheap. High takes longer and costs more. The company says it lands close to their most expensive model at about half the price.

That's a dimmer, not a light switch. And it's the first time these companies have handed the dial to the person paying the bill.

Here's why I'm telling you. Businesses have been getting surprise invoices from this stuff — you ask a simple question, the thing chews on it for a minute and a half, and you pay for the minute and a half. Nobody asked for that. Now you can match the setting to the size of the job, the same way you don't run a 200-amp service to a garden shed.

Most of what a small shop needs — a rewritten email, a cleaned-up estimate, a plain-English answer — is low or medium work. Save the high setting for the thing that actually deserves it.