effortless

Website · Install · What it shows · Judges

A Claude Code mod that picks the model and the reasoning effort for every prompt. Easy questions run on Haiku or
Sonnet at a low effort; hard jobs get High on your own model, and you never touch the model or Effort control.
In one long chat on Opus about half the replies ran on Sonnet or Haiku, roughly half the cost by our estimate. One bar above the prompt also shows how full the chat is, how long
the prompt cache stays warm, and hands off or compacts in one click when a chat gets heavy.

Powered by Haiku 5.5

Haiku 5.5 costs about 75% less than Haiku 4.5, and Anthropic names compaction and quick, well-defined work among what
it is built for. effortless uses it in three places:

Each can be switched off: Settings → Judge → Model, and Settings → Handoff → Compact with.

Install

Two ways. Both take a minute and need no terminal.

1. Ask Claude (easiest). Paste this into Claude Code and press Enter:

Install the effortless plugin for me: run `claude plugin marketplace add HeyCubit/effortless` and then `claude plugin install effortless@effortless`. When both succeed, tell me to run /reload-plugins.

2. Commands. Type these two lines in Claude Code's chat box:

/plugin marketplace add HeyCubit/effortless

/plugin install effortless@effortless

Or in a terminal, in one line:

claude plugin marketplace add HeyCubit/effortless; claude plugin install effortless@effortless

Then run /reload-plugins (or restart Claude Code). A short setup opens above the prompt: keep Haiku alone (one click,
no key, runs on your own Claude login) or add Jev (a TypeSafe key, about 4x faster effort calls), lean cheaper or
smarter, and pick how handoffs are written. Run /effortless setup to go through it again, or change any of it in ⚙.

Updates come to you: when a new version is out, a card above the prompt offers Update or Later. Update loads the
new version in the chat you pressed it in, with nothing to type.

What the bar shows

Prefer it quiet? Settings → Customize has a Minimal look with no bar.

When a chat gets heavy

When the cache has gone cold on a big chat, the bar turns to ice with Compact and Handoff:

Handoff writes a summary of the chat and carries on in a clean one. Quick takes a few seconds; Full checks
git and saves HANDOFF.md (or runs your own skill). Then clear and carry on, clear and wait, or keep the chat and copy.

Compact takes an optional note for what the summary should keep. Every compaction, also /compact and the automatic one, is written by Haiku 5.5 by default, which Anthropic recommends for compaction at a fraction of the chat model's price; if Haiku fails, Claude Code compacts as usual. Switch it in Settings → Handoff → Compact with.

The bar also warns when a chat is getting swamped (each message re-reads a lot of context), when a 5-hour or weekly
limit passes 80% (with a Save mode that caps effort at Medium), and when your judge stops answering.

Settings

Haiku, and Jev if you add it

Haiku 5.5 runs on your own Claude login and needs no key. It always makes the handoff call: from 30% of context, every second message, it reads what the chat was for, the trail of topics, the last reply and how full the context is, and says a fresh chat would suit only for a clear reason. Then the Compact button turns into a lit Handoff with the reason. Want Handoff on the bar all the time? Settings → Handoff → Handoff button → Always.

Haiku also picks the effort, unless you add Jev, TypeSafe's faster judge (about 0.25 s against about 1 s). With a key, Jev answers the effort first and Haiku steps in whenever Jev is unsure. Run /plugin configure effortless@effortless in Claude Code, or use the setup guide or the Judge card in Settings.

Keys are stored as secret settings by Claude Code, never in a file of this repo. If Jev fails or takes longer than 3 seconds, Haiku judges that prompt and effortless tells you why once per session (out of credits, key rejected, no answer).

Short follow-ups such as "go", "ok" or "yes" keep the effort already picked and ask no judge.

Keys and trust

• The default judge needs no key: Haiku runs on your own Claude login.
• A key is only needed to add Jev. Enter it with /plugin configure, never on the command line, so it stays out of your shell history. Claude Code keeps it in its secure storage, not in a file.
• A key is sent only to TypeSafe, and to nothing else. Use a key with a spending limit if your provider offers one.
• Like any Claude Code plugin, this mod runs code on your machine. Its code is in hooks/: read it before you install if you do not know the author. The programs it starts are claude itself (to update or uninstall the mod when you press those buttons), git (to see if a new version is out) and, on Update, a plain file copy of the new version into the folder your open chat runs from.

What it saves, honestly

Measured over 80k requests of real Claude Code use, about 76% of the cost is the context being read back from the cache on every tool call, 16% cache writes and only 8% output. Effort mostly changes how many tool calls a prompt makes.

• Against a high default (high, xhigh) Auto saves a lot: a median xhigh prompt cost about three times a medium one.
• Against a medium default it mostly saves a few percent, and gives hard jobs high on their own.
• Keeping chats short and compacting before the cache goes cold often saves more than effort does. That is what the countdown is for.

How often the judge is right

/effortless bench runs labelled prompts through each judge you have set up, using the same code a real prompt goes
through, and scores them against a fixed effort. Each case lists the efforts a careful person would accept for that
message on that model. The cases are in bench/judge-cases.json; run it yourself.

Two runs on version 1.5.1, 73 cases, Sonnet and Opus 5.5:

What this does and does not show:

• It measures whether the judge picks a sensible effort, not how much a session costs or how good the answers are.
• 73 cases is a small set, and the judges are not fully deterministic: runs differ by a few points.
• The judge prompts were tuned on 53 of the cases. The 20 held-out cases were never tuned against, so that column is
  the honest one. They were written after the first run showed which kinds of message miss, so they are not blind.
• Haiku's remaining misses are mostly "yes" or "thanks" after hard work, where it keeps the effort high.

Models

Effort only changes on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5. On Fable 5.1 and older models a change of effort between requests rewrote most of the prompt cache, which costs more than it saves, so Auto pauses there and the footer says Paused. Haiku takes no effort setting.

Split view

In the desktop app's split view, Claude Code draws plugin bars only in the left pane. The right pane still draws
replies, so when a chat went cold, is getting swamped or runs hot, a small card in the bar's colours hangs under the
newest reply, naming the command that does what the bar's button would: /compact, /effortless handoff or
/effortless save.

In the terminal

effortless draws in the terminal CLI too, with moving pixel art in its bands. Claude Code may not load a plugin's code
there yet: if /effortless says the mod is not loaded after a restart, add this to ~/.claude/settings.json and
restart:

{ "env": { "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_FUNCTION_HOOKS": "1" } }

Tested on Claude Code 2.1.285 (stable), 2.1.286 and 2.1.288 at 80 and 120 columns. Below 90 columns the bands leave their art out.

Commands

Open source

effortless is MIT licensed. Like any Claude Code plugin it runs code on your machine, so the whole mod is here to read:
hooks/. It sends nothing anywhere except your prompt to the judge you picked.

Develop

claude plugin validate .
claude plugin test .
claude --plugin-dir .

tools/render-band draws the bar the way the desktop app does, without opening it; the images in this README come from it.

License

MIT