Reasoning effort

Reasoning effort is used with reasoning-capable models to trade off answer quality, latency, cost, and verbosity. Higher effort can help with complex planning, math, coding, analysis, and multi-step tool workflows, while lower effort can be better for simple classification, rewriting, routing, or fast chat. Provider APIs expose this idea in different ways, such as explicit effort levels, thinking budgets, or model-specific reasoning controls. Teams should route tasks by complexity instead of using maximum effort for every request.