Dev builds adaptive harness that auto-scales LLM reasoning effort up and down

milpster · reddit · 2026-09-06

A Reddit developer proposes an alternative to manually fixing thinking-effort levels: modify your harness so the system adaptively raises or lowers reasoning effort between low and xhigh based on success and failure streaks.

The posted logs show it downshifts on "stable successful streaks" and escalates on "meaningful failures", combined with phase tracking (EXPLORE/DEBUG/IMPLEMENT). Subjectively it speeds up problem solving considerably, but no reliable quality evaluation yet — the author is considering a GPQA Diamond before/after test.

Related event: Developer tests adaptive reasoning effort that lets LLMs pick their own thinking level(2 posts)→

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