Top reasoning effort costs up to 42x more on tasks low effort already solves
zainhas · x · 2026-10-29
A systematic study ran multiple models across reasoning-effort levels and benchmarks. Key finding: when your agent solves a task at the highest effort, you can't tell whether low effort would have sufficed without rerunning—and every rerun costs tokens. On tasks that low effort can already solve, maxing out effort costs up to 42× more. It highlights hidden waste in agent workflows: defaulting to top reasoning levels may be massively overpaying for tasks that could be solved cheaply.
Related event: Max reasoning effort costs 42x more, often unnecessary(4 posts)→
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