AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is reasoning effort?
Reasoning effort: A setting offered by some model APIs that controls how much thinking a reasoning model does before answering, typically as levels such as low, medium and high. Higher effort usually improves hard-task accuracy but raises latency and cost.
Reasoning effort: an example
Use low effort for extracting an invoice number and high effort for debugging a tricky concurrency bug.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Recency bias in prompts
- Refine summarisation
- Reflexion
- Repetition penalty
- Rephrase and Respond
- Role prompting
- Rolling summary
- Schema-constrained generation
Where you learn it
Reasoning effort is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.