Stage 2 · Lesson 2 of 6
Effort and thinking settings
Most providers now let you control how much a model thinks. Anthropic calls it , with levels such as low, medium and high; OpenAI uses a reasoning effort setting; Gemini uses a thinking setting. Higher effort usually means better answers on hard problems, more and slower replies.
Lower effort makes the same model cheaper and quicker. This means "which model?" and "how much thinking?" are two separate choices. A middle-tier model at high effort sometimes beats a top-tier model at low effort, and costs less.
Do not set effort once and forget it: set it per task (each kind of request in your product), and test each level on your own examples.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Prompt Engineering for Software Engineers
Design Gurus · Beginner · Subscription
Write prompts with clear rules and formats, so you can test instruction following properly
- VideoFreeDeep Dive into Large Language Models like ChatGPT
Andrej Karpathy · Intermediate
Free: a clear explanation of how reasoning models are trained and why thinking helps
Practise
Keep handy
Also worth your time
How reasoning effort works in practice and where the reasoning tokens show up in usage
- Large Language Model CourseGo deeper
Free: go deeper into how models are trained, which explains where reasoning comes from