What changed?
Anthropic has made Claude Opus 5.5 the default model on all paid plans. The company also published a prompting guide to help users work more efficiently with the model.
Old habits slow things down
The guide's main message is to drop old prompting patterns such as "think hard." According to Anthropic, users get better results by starting directly at medium effort.
Why it matters
Prompting habits are starting to age as model versions change. Anthropic's guide is notable for acknowledging that approaching the new model with old methods can hurt performance.
