This week, my token usage jumped, and the quality of responses plummeted. Then, I started asking directly if it read and/or followed the folder's Cluade.md and Context.md. I've attached the response. Anyone else having this problem?

I ran Opus 4.8 at max thinking effort this week. The finding isn't "it's smarter." The finding is where that thinking goes, and what it needs before it pays off. Here's what nobody tells you about high-effort reasoning. It only thrives when there's something to reason over. Drop a max-thinking model into an empty context and you get a slow, confident guess. Drop it into a workspace you've actually built, the briefs, the memory, the prior decisions, the evidence, and it does something different. It digs. Three things I noticed. 1. Context is the unlock, not the model. The jump from 4.7 to 4.8 wasn't really "smarter weights." It was better use of the room you give it. The intelligence isn't in the model. It's in the environment you set up before you ask the question. 2. The slow part is the feature. Thinking times went up a lot. That felt like a cost until I read what it was doing. It wasn't stalling. It was hunting through the context for evidence before answering. Judge the reasoning, not the clock. The pause is the work. 3. It reasons evidence-first. This is the real shift. 4.8 goes looking for proof in your context before it commits to an answer. 4.7 tended to answer first, then justify. Working backwards from evidence instead of forwards from a guess changes the quality of everything downstream. It's the best reasoning I've seen from any model, and it only shows up when the evidence is there to find. So the lesson isn't "turn thinking up." Effort and context are a pair. Max effort on a thin context is an expensive guess. Max effort on a built-out workspace is a researcher. Build the room before you ask the question. Full deep-dive available at: https://www.aris-space.com/documents/workspaces/max-thinking-empty-room ASIDE —> After @Ruben Aguirre 's great post earlier today. If you highlight over any AI terminology, it will give you a plain English explanation of what that is. And there's also a glossary at the bottom to help. <3