{"type":"post","id":"what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045","slug":"what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045","title":"What Effort Level Should I Choose? On the Economics of Reasoning Effort in LLM Agents","description":"A study of proprietary and open-weight models finds that higher reasoning effort can raise aggregate accuracy while still losing tasks solved at lower settings; on easy tasks, the highest setting cost up to 42 times as much as the lowest.","retrieval_nugget":"A study of proprietary and open-weight models finds that higher reasoning effort can raise aggregate accuracy while still losing tasks solved at lower settings; on easy tasks, the highest setting cost up to 42 times as much as the lowest. For builders, the practical implication is to test effort allocation per task rather than defaulting to maximum reasoning.","published_at":"2026-11-04","updated_at":"2026-11-04","record_date":"2026-11-04","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["agent-economics"],"entities":["Johns Hopkins University","Together AI","Cornell University","Terminus-2","mini-swe-agent","AIME 2026","GPQA Diamond","SWE-Bench Pro"],"related_patterns":["agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work"],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"New research quantifies that higher reasoning effort can fail on tasks lower effort solves and cost up to 42× more on easy tasks, while proposing escalation after verified failure as a cheaper alternative.","prior_refs":[],"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.34491","source_urls":["https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.34491"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045.json"},"markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/what-effort-level-should-i-choose-on-the-059045.md","next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/agent-economics/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics/","title":"Agent Economics","reason":"Explore the agent-economics topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/sources/","url":"https://newruntime.com/sources/","title":"Sources","reason":"See the original sources this archive cites.","media_type":"text/html"}]}