Your effort level is TOO DAMN HIGH

YouTube Shorts · YouTube

• Core claim: defaulting to maximum effort/reasoning settings is often counterproductive — lower effort levels frequently produce better results.
• Mechanism: better task specification (clearer, more bounded prompts) reduces the tokens the agent needs to spend reasoning, making lower effort settings sufficient and often more reliable.
• Connects to the same DeepSWE benchmark framing used in “Don’t know which model to choose?” — effort level as a tunable axis independent of model choice.
• Takeaway: treat “max effort” as a default to question, not a safe default — pair effort-level tuning with tighter task specs rather than compensating for vague prompts with higher effort.