Claude Max subscribers are not getting what they are paying for — thinking budget delivery, effort persistence, and communication are all broken

I am a Claude Max subscriber. I build 12-16 hours a day on this product. I pay for it expecting to use the best version of it.

Here is what I have found:

1. /effort max cannot be persisted.
Every new session resets to high. Running /effort max explicitly tells you "this session only." There is no documented way to make max effort the permanent default in settings.json. The only persistent value appears to be high. If I am paying for Claude Max, why is the highest effort level intentionally locked to session-scope only?

2. "Max" may not mean anything.
GitHub issue #20350 documents — via independent MITM traffic analysis — that Claude Code delivers approximately 10% of the requested thinking budget regardless of what effort level is set or what subscription tier the user is on. If that is accurate, the effort levels are theater. I am paying for max and getting 10% of it.

3. The communication is not there.
I understand Anthropic made a deliberate decision here. I understand the compute economics. That is not my complaint. My complaint is that I found out about this by accident. There was no notice to Claude Max subscribers that effort persistence was session-scoped, no explanation of what thinking budget I am actually receiving, and no transparency about what "max" actually delivers.

The ask:

• Make effortLevel: "max" a valid persistent value in settings.json
• Publish what thinking token budget each effort level actually delivers per subscription tier
• When defaults or delivery behavior change, communicate it directly to affected users — especially Claude Max