LightEffort changes Claude Code’s effort level with one hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+1 to Ctrl+Alt+5).
Claude Code has five effort levels: low, medium, high, xhigh and max. They decide how hard the model thinks before it answers. Low is cheap and fast and fine for renaming a variable. Max is for the design of a subsystem you will live with for years.
So I switch between them all day. And every switch means typing /effort xhigh, pressing Enter, and then answering a little confirmation question. Not amusing.
What it does
It sits in the tray and owns five hotkeys:
- Ctrl+Alt+1 – low
- Ctrl+Alt+2 – medium
- Ctrl+Alt+3 – high
- Ctrl+Alt+4 – xhigh
- Ctrl+Alt+5 – max
Press one while a terminal running Claude Code has the keyboard focus. LightEffort types /effort high into the prompt, presses Enter, and answers the “Change effort level?” question that Claude Code shows when its prompt cache is warm. You watch it happen and then carry on.
It also gives the keys back. While the focused window is not a terminal, Ctrl+Alt+1 to Ctrl+Alt+5 belong to whatever program you are using – Total Commander, your editor, anything. LightEffort takes them again the moment a terminal comes to the front. This matters more than it sounds: RegisterHotKey, the Windows call behind a system-wide hotkey, has no “only while window X has focus” option, so the taking and giving back has to be done by hand, twice a second.
Does changing the effort costs you?
Yes, it can cost you tokens, depending on which LLM you are and what you are chaining (LLM/effort). I did some extensive research to see when it costs tokens and how much exactly.
Details will be published soon in my 5th Delphi book.
Download
Download LightEffort v2.0 – Free. No installer. Signed exe.
How to use it
Press Ctrl+Alt+1 to Ctrl+Alt+5.
Good to know
A press costs about 2.7 seconds before your typed text is back in the box. You cannot type a new command in those 2.7 seconds. Most of that time is deliberate: the keys go out one at a time, because a whole burst of them arriving in the same instant is read differently by the prompt.
I will make it faster. I promise.
Programs for AI
The program uses my own LightSaber library for the application skeleton – the form that saves its own position, the INI handling, the logging, the single-instance check.
If you want to see how a Windows program that drives another program is put together, that whole style of code is what my books are about, and Book 5 in particular is about working with AI assistants in Delphi.