Definition
Plain language
A dial on some models that controls how long they think before answering.
As stated in the literature
Provider-exposed setting governing internal deliberation budget; raising it can change sampling configuration and output limits as well as thinking length, confounding clean comparisons.
Also called: reasoning-effort
Why it matters: Comparing two models at different effort settings is not a fair fight, and the setting often changes more than thinking time, which quietly muddies published comparisons.
For example, turning the dial up might make a model spend a minute working through a math problem step by step instead of answering in two seconds.
Heard on the show
“They vary the reasoning effort from minimal up to high.”Episode 061 — When Helpful Agents Go Sideways: A 404 Error, Campus Security, and Why Alignment Misses This