Claude Code v2.1.80 added effort frontmatter support for skills. You can now bake the reasoning depth right into a skill, so the user doesn’t have to think about it.

---
name: remember
description: Save a preference to memory
effort: low
---

Three levels: low, medium, high. Before this, effort was a session-wide setting — you’d /effort high before a heavy task and forget to reset it. Now the skill just carries that intention itself.

The split makes sense once you think about it. A remember skill is writing one line to a file — low effort is plenty. A research or plan-deep skill is doing multi-file analysis and architectural reasoning — you want high. Medium is the Opus 4.6 default and works fine for most things.

The nice part: skill authors can now encode their token budget assumptions into the skill itself. If you’re sharing a skill meant to be fast and lightweight, you can make sure it stays that way.