3 ms·
One thing I've noticed and HATE, is that when you increase thinking-effort, that seemingly increases response-length. Meaning that X.High is longer than High, w
by Someone1234 25d ago
One thing I've noticed and HATE, is that when you increase thinking-effort, that seemingly increases response-length. Meaning that X.High is longer than High, which is longer than Medium, etc.
Which is kind of the inverse of how people work; a really smart person can condense difficult ideas into simple[r] terms. Whereas people who struggle speak a lot but say very little.
High/X.High do seem to deliver better quality results, but it sometimes feels like needle-in-haystack extracting that from the word vomit.
- TeMPOraL 25d agoWith LLMs, you're still mostly read things "off the tip of the tongue". A better comparison is observing a smart person talking to themselves while working on a tough problem. EDIT: also there's a reason the dial is called "effort", not "smarts".
- apsurd 25d ago[dead]
- adastra22 25d agoYes, but that should apply to the CoT "thinking", not the final output.
- AdAstraSucked 24d ago[flagged]
- skohan 25d agoI don't think smart people generally solve problems by talking through reasoning steps at a mile a minute. They clear their mind and let the solution come. Of course I don't know if there's really a way for this to be molded in current LLM's (sounds more like diffusion)
- red75prime 24d ago> They clear their mind and let the solution come. They work on a problem until their brain is full of problem-related concepts. Then something comes. After validation it might be a solution.
- ComputerGuru 25d agoOpenAI has separate dials for verbosity and reasoning_effort (but could still do a better job).
- marcelo-earth 25d agoI hate this too, I had to switch to Codex, because the skill to force Claude Code not to think too much about very, very basic things no longer worked
- alasano 25d agoIt's so bad I've made myself a Pi extension that rewrites responses in side by side view using models on Cerebras (insanely fast tps)
- visarga 24d agoIt's so bad I made my own chat client for Claude, so I can attach steering prompts in conversation. They are applied just at the end, before the last LLM response, then removed and response kept.
- wongarsu 25d agoThe higher the effort the more things Claude checks, and it's eager to tell you about all of them See, this insight it had early on looked like a red hering for a while, but then turned out to be load-bearing. And that's not just a difference in semantics, it changed the whole conclusion (spoiler: it didn't). And Claude is very eager to tell you about this exciting journey
- fschuett 25d agoI just go over the comments with Gemini 3.1 Pro at the end which has a much more normal "voice" and it doesn't lose nuance as a cheap model would. I don't care so much about what Claude writes during the debugging as I just do all the cleanup at the end instead of at every commit.
- Lucasoato 24d ago“I have made this letter longer only because I didn’t have the time to make it shorter.” - Blaise Pascal
- visarga 24d ago> when you increase thinking-effort, that seemingly increases response-length I use the /sss writing style - synthetic, short and simple - and it helps a lot.