AI agent glossary
Reasoning effort
A setting that controls how hard a thinking model works on a request, trading speed and cost for thoroughness.
Models that think before answering usually expose a dial, called effort or reasoning effort, that sets how much deliberation to spend. Low effort means short thinking, brief answers, and fewer tool calls. High effort means considering alternatives and checking work.
Current Claude models decide for themselves how much to think on each request, and effort sets their overall disposition. Some cannot turn thinking off at all, so for simple tasks the right move is to lower effort, not to look for an off switch. Defaults differ between models, so set effort explicitly when cost or quality matters.
Match effort to the task: low for classification and extraction, higher for debugging, planning, and analysis. It is often a cheaper lever than switching to a bigger model.
An agent runs its ticket-routing step at low effort and its root-cause analysis step at high effort, cutting cost without hurting the hard step.
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