# Reasoning Effort

> A model setting that trades latency and cost for more or less internal reasoning before producing an answer.

- Category: Reasoning & Inference
- Stage: Rising
- Also called: Thinking budget, Inference effort, Adaptive reasoning
- Canonical: https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/reasoning-effort

## Plain English

You can ask the model to think lightly for easy work or spend more effort on hard work.

## Example

A coding assistant uses low reasoning effort for a quick rename and high effort for a failing distributed-systems test.

## Why it matters

Reasoning effort makes inference-time quality, cost, and speed a product-level control rather than a hidden model behavior.

## Related

- [Reasoning Model](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/reasoning-model)
- [Test-Time Compute](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/test-time-compute)
- [Model Routing](https://www.joelcsaji.com/ai-dictionary/model-routing)

## Sources

- [OpenAI: Reasoning Models](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/reasoning)