Is thinking mode wasting your tokens? Paper author: it depends on task difficulty
Jeande_d · x · 2026-08-30
Asked whether enabling thinking/reasoning mode wastes tokens, the author of a paper on reasoning-model behaviors answers: yes and no.
- For frontier models from major providers, the difference mostly comes down to task difficulty: on genuinely hard problems, thinking mode helps a lot because models know how to use the extra tokens — working through the problem and catching mistakes.
- On easy tasks, extra thinking yields limited gains while burning more tokens.
- The author notes chatbot interfaces give users little guidance on when thinking mode helps — exactly what the paper studies: which behaviors become more common in reasoning models and which actually correlate with better answers.
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