so hyperfocusing on a specific tiny thing, but to try and show a general thing that is true about the design of this thing:

as a metaphor, imagine that the path that some value has to take from configuration/user input to where it is used is like firefighters trying to get water from a fire hydrant to the fire.

the best case scenario maybe is that the place has builtin sprinklers, so when there's a fire the value is already there and more or less automatically derived from the design of the building - you have a deterministic config derivation object/function. a not-ideal-but-probably-more-typical way might be "a firehose" where there is some direct pipe from the hydrant to the fire - you have a single source of the variable and it's passed directly to where it needs to go, even if that's a little bit indirect through a few function calls.

the way that this and a lot of claude code is written is like one step worse than those old timey bucket brigades: it's like if you had a bucket brigade, but everyone was looking in a different direction and holding their bucket in the expected place that they expect water to go. When they feel water landing in their bucket, everyone hail marys and chucks their water to where they think the next person is going to be. That works a surprising amount of the time as long as everyone stands still - it fails a lot of the time too, and sometimes some of the guys sneak off to go get a jug of their own water and throw that instead, but it appears to work on the whole.

But every time the fire moves to a different place, you have to go through and manually readjust where everyone is looking, standing, and where they should throw water to next. And any time you notice that one part of the bucket crew isn't working, you just add two more people near where they are standing and tell the person behind them to throw to three different places, and you turn up the flow from the hydrant. It's leaky as fuck but water does eventually get there in some form.

Throughout the lifespan of the variable, the "effort" value is tossed up, potentially becomes a number for awhile, gets converted to undefined, which transmutes it back to the "high" string, is pulled from a file on the disk, and only through sheer brute force at the very surface of the functionality through the tests are we sure that - assuming everything went right - it arrives at its destination. The fire might eventually get some water, but it is only through the most puppetfuckingly obtuse process and if anyone moves the water goes to zero.