Anything less and it would lose track of details
gwerbin on Hacker News
In the thread “Anthropic appears to be A/B testing reduced effort levels in Claude Code”, replying to this comment
Helped: High reasoning effort to retain details across multiple sources.
Got in the way: Low effort models lost track of details and made bad recommendations.
I found that I need the big model and the high reasoning effort on tasks where I have a large amount of details of varying levels of importance to keep in mind, all affecting different aspects of the project that might be interrelated to various degrees. Anything less and it would lose track of details. Whereas the very large amount of thinking tokens seem to give the model a chance to "remember" everything it needed to in order to produce good output. …