Letting the Model Pick Its Own Thinking Effort: An Adaptive Harness Experiment

HeDo88TH · reddit · 2026-09-06

Prompted by the Qwen 3.8 27B thinking-levels debate, a Reddit developer suggests a harness modification that lets the LLM itself decide when to raise or lower reasoning effort. The system dynamically switches between low and xhigh based on success/failure streaks and task phase — dropping to low on stable success streaks or mechanical steps, escalating on meaningful failures or when entering DEBUG/RECOVER phases, with structured JSON logs tracking each transition. Early results show much faster task completion, though no reliable quality evaluation has been collected yet; he muses about before/after GPQA Diamond testing and asks whether anyone has tried something similar.

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