Option to choose Token Budget Vs. Effort level

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

With either Sonnet or Opus 4.6, effort = medium makes them seem "dumb" as compared with using budget tokens, and effort = max results in long "thinking" gaps without much productivity.

Proposed Solution

For my Julia / C# development work, I much prefer the previous preset token budget over setting a fixed level of effort. I think this is because the level of effort needs to be determined dynamically and allowed to vary across a given task as needed rather than preset. It would be nice to be able to choose between preset budget vs. preset level of effort.

Alternative Solutions

I have yet to find a good workaround.

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Performance and speed

Use Case Example

I work interactively with Claude code all day every day. The new effort designation has seriously impacted the amount of actual progress on my projects.

Additional Context

_No response_