Effort level
Updated 2026-08-04
Questions this answers
- What does "effort" or "reasoning effort" mean on a model?
- Why would I make an AI think harder or less hard?
- My answers are slow and expensive. Can I dial that down?
- When should I turn reasoning up to max?
The Fix
Effort level is a dial for how hard a model thinks before it answers. Turn it up and the model spends more time reasoning through the problem and checking its own work, which helps on hard math and tricky code. Lower it and you get a faster, cheaper answer, fine for simple stuff. Reasoning models expose this as a setting, from low up to high or max, and Claude Code has a /effort command for it.
More thinking isn't free. Higher effort means more tokens and a bigger bill, and past a point it stops helping. On an easy question, cranking it to max mostly makes you wait for nothing. Save the high settings for hard problems, where the extra thinking can flip a wrong answer to a right one.
When to Use It
Turn effort up when a problem is hard and getting it right matters more than speed: gnarly debugging, or math you can't afford to fumble. Turn it down for quick lookups and anything where you'd spot a bad answer instantly, since the extra thinking is wasted there.
The trap is leaving it high all the time, which quietly runs up cost and latency for no gain on easy work. Match the dial to the task, and if you're not sure, most tools have an auto setting that picks for you.