3 ms·
I'm actually currently working on benchmarking the opus 4.7 reasoning curve against real-world tasks, and have found that reasoning effort does not seem to mono
by bisonbear 5mo ago
I'm actually currently working on benchmarking the opus 4.7 reasoning curve against real-world tasks, and have found that reasoning effort does not seem to monotonically improve results (at least on the slice I'm looking at). I've been puzzling about this but perhaps the fact that claude code has adaptive thinking explains some of it - even at medium reasoning effort, it can use more thinking tokens when needed to solve a complex problem.
Snapshot of the results (sorry for busted format, ask your llm for dataviz. cant seem to format a good table in the comments)
Opus 4.7 on GraphQL-go-tools:
Low: 23/29 pass, 10/29 equivalent, 5/29 review-pass, custom avg 2.598, $2.50/task, 384s/task
Medium: 28/29 pass, 14/29 equivalent, 10/29 review-pass, custom avg 2.759, $3.15/task, 451s/task
High: 26/29 pass, 12/29 equivalent, 7/29 review-pass, custom avg 2.670, $5.01/task, 716s/task
Xhigh: 25/29 pass, 11/29 equivalent, 4/29 review-pass, custom avg 2.669, $6.51/task, 804s/task
Max: 27/29 pass, 13/29 equivalent, 8/29 review-pass, custom avg 2.690, $8.84/task, 997s/task
(custom avg is a set of rubrics used for llm-as-a-judge, graded out of 4)
Practically, the results indicate that medium has better outcomes, or at least the same outcomes, considering variance, as higher reasoning efforts, at a much lower cost/time.
- vincent_s 5mo agoThe effort parameter in Claude Code is essentially useless. It’s just an expression that you wish it to do deeper reasoning but Anthropic can and does ignore it without even telling you.
- bisonbear 5mo agoClaude does appear to work for longer, and use more tokens, when at higher reasoning modes. It just doesn't seem like this increased token usage leads to better actual outcomes