Opus 4 7 Code Best Practices

Opus 4.7 prompting and session tuning for Claude Code

Instructions

1. Start with a complete first-turn brief: include intent, constraints, acceptance criteria, and where in the codebase the work should happen.
2. Minimize back-and-forth in interactive sessions by batching questions and supplying needed context up front.
3. Use effort levels deliberately. Treat xhigh as the default for most agentic coding, use high when you need to reduce spend or run concurrent sessions, and use max selectively for extremely hard or eval-style problems.
4. Remember Opus 4.7 uses adaptive thinking; prompt explicitly if you want faster, more direct replies or more careful step-by-step reasoning.
5. If your workflow benefits from tool use or parallel subagents, say so explicitly, since Opus 4.7 tends to call tools and spawn subagents less often by default.

Examples

User: "Migrate the auth module to the new middleware. Constraints: keep public API stable; update tests; files: src/auth/**. Acceptance: all tests pass."
Assistant: "I will keep the brief from the first turn and run at xhigh effort for the migration, batching questions to reduce extra turns."

User: "Do a code review of these three packages. Be aggressive about reading files and fanning out."
Assistant: "I will spawn multiple subagents in the same turn to review packages in parallel, and I will read files proactively since Opus 4.7 calls tools less often by default."

Source

Distilled from Best practices for using Claude Opus 4.7 with Claude Code (published 2026-04-16).