Effort
A provider-specific setting that adjusts a reasoning model’s allocation of internal work.
Illustrative conversation
- Should we set reasoning effort to the maximum for every coding task?
- No. Start with a balanced setting and increase it only when evaluations show a useful quality gain.
Definition
Reasoning effort is provider-specific terminology for a model setting that changes how much internal work a reasoning model applies before producing its answer. Supported levels vary by model and trade latency and token use against the possibility of better results on difficult tasks. A higher setting is not automatically better; teams should compare levels on representative evaluations and choose the lowest one that reliably meets the task's quality bar.
Reviewed