What is the difference between Claude Sonnet 5's response-length calibration and a fixed verbosity default?

A fixed verbosity default means a model tends toward roughly the same response length and level of detail regardless of whether the underlying task is trivial or genuinely complex, which can mean over-explaining simple requests or under-explaining complex ones.

Claude Sonnet 5's response length instead scales with the perceived complexity of the task itself, so a simple factual question and a genuinely multistep problem are expected to produce meaningfully different response lengths by default, without needing separate prompt instructions to achieve that difference.

The practical implication for prompt engineering is that length-control instructions on Sonnet 5 are more about setting an explicit ceiling or floor for a specific product's needs, rather than correcting a uniformly-miscalibrated default the way they might be needed on a model with fixed verbosity behavior.

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