AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is thinking budget?
Thinking budget (also called Extended thinking budget): A cap on the number of tokens a model may spend on its internal reasoning before it must answer. Setting it balances answer quality against cost and delay. Simple queries need a small budget, hard ones a larger one.
Thinking budget: an example
Set a thinking budget of 2,000 tokens for a quick classification and 16,000 for a multi-step maths proof.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Token budget
- Token counting
- Token pricing
- Tool choice
- Tool description
- Tool result message
- Tool schema
- Tree of Thoughts
Where you learn it
Thinking budget is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.