effort-calibrator

effort-calibrator is a skill for Claude Code from kpab/claude-fable-5-skills. It costs 118 tokens per session (1,273 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for choosing how much reasoning effort an AI coding agent should spend on a task. The setting trades off answer quality against waiting time and usage cost.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for configuring effort in coding, analysis, writing, routine transformations, large migrations, long autonomous runs, and other workloads.
Why use it?
Using the highest setting for every task can make routine work slower and more expensive without improving the result. The guide provides starting points and signals for changing the setting.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the fable5-skills plugin — 11 skills shipped together

Good fit It is for configuring effort in coding, analysis, writing, routine transformations, large migrations, long autonomous runs, and other workloads.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/effort-calibrator
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add kpab/claude-fable-5-skills --skill effort-calibrator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install fable5-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for effort-calibrator

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/effort-calibrator/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/effort-calibrator)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/effort-calibrator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/effort-calibrator/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for effort-calibrator

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/effort-calibrator"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/effort-calibrator.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 118 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,273 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00118 $0.01273
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.00636
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00255
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00127

Measured 8d ago against content hash 1e974528ae73, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

effort-calibrator scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/effort-calibrator/SKILL.md · 49 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 49 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Effort Calibrator

On Fable 5 and 5.1, effort is the primary dial trading intelligence against latency and cost. Settings inherited from earlier models are usually wrong here, and so are settings inherited from Fable 5 by 5.1: an effort name does not buy the same amount of thinking across generations, so re-run your sweep on 5.1 even if you already tuned Fable 5. Reference points: Fable 5 at lower effort frequently beats earlier models at xhigh; Fable 5.1 at medium roughly matches Fable 5 at lower cost, and at low it often scores higher than Opus and Sonnet models at a similar cost per task, so include it wherever you would otherwise run a smaller model at higher effort.

Starting points by workload

Workload Start at
Routine transforms, classification, short edits, chat, subagents medium (try low if latency matters)
Most analysis and writing high (the general default)
Coding and agentic/tool-heavy work high (the API and Claude Code default on Fable 5 and 5.1) — even for workloads that ran at xhigh on earlier Opus models; escalate to xhigh only for the most capability-sensitive tasks
Hardest capability-sensitive work: large migrations, multi-day autonomous runs, novel research xhigh — on 5.1 this is where the gains over Fable 5 are largest, at the price of longer thinking before the first response
Frontier problems only, where evals show headroom above xhigh and token spend is unconstrained max

The signal for max is evals showing headroom above xhigh on your actual task: on most workloads it adds significant cost for small gains and can tip into overthinking.

Adjustment signals

Lower effort when:

  • Tasks complete correctly but take longer than the work warrants
  • The session is interactive and waiting hurts more than marginal quality helps
  • Output shows over-deliberation: long context-gathering before trivial actions

Raise effort when:

  • First-shot correctness matters more than turnaround (one-way-door changes, unattended runs)
  • The task benefits from rigorous self-verification, which higher effort does noticeably better
  • A task failed at the current level in a way that looks like shallow reasoning, not missing information
  • At low, 5.1 answers from memory where it should have called a search or retrieval tool — raise effort for the turns that need fresh information, or add a prompt line saying that recognizing a name is not the same as knowing its current state

Read the full file on GitHub · 49 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago Changed · +8 lines · +27 tokens per session 1e974528ae73
  2. 12d ago First seen · 41 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A 6d138104685d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

effort-calibrator is a skill published in the GitHub repository kpab/claude-fable-5-skills (17 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 118 tokens to every session and 1,273 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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