--- title: Your effort level is TOO DAMN HIGH | daily.dev description: Using maximum effort/thinking tokens in AI coding agents is often wasteful. Lower effort settings are more efficient for exploration tasks, and the quality gap... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/your-effort-level-is-too-damn-high-adro5xzgu twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Your effort level is TOO DAMN HIGH | daily.dev og:description: Using maximum effort/thinking tokens in AI coding agents is often wasteful. Lower effort settings are more efficient for exploration tasks, and the quality gap... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/your-effort-level-is-too-damn-high-adro5xzgu og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/ADRO5xzGU.png og:image:alt: Your effort level is TOO DAMN HIGH og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Your effort level is TOO DAMN HIGH **[Matt Pocock](https://daily.dev/sources/mattpocock)** · 1 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Using maximum effort/thinking tokens in AI coding agents is often wasteful. Lower effort settings are more efficient for exploration tasks, and the quality gap seen in benchmarks doesn't account for the developer's ability to provide better task specifications. The recommendation is to start with the lowest effort level and increase only as needed, since high-quality input context reduces the need for heavy reasoning. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Tell your model when to think harder](https://daily.dev/posts/tell-your-model-when-to-think-harder-wz9zilrjq) · Visual Studio Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#prompt-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/prompt-engineering), [#context-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/context-engineering) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/your-effort-level-is-too-damn-high-adro5xzgu) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Your effort level is TOO DAMN HIGH","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/your-effort-level-is-too-damn-high-adro5xzgu","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/your-effort-level-is-too-damn-high-adro5xzgu"},"datePublished":"2026-07-15T10:41:36.008Z","dateModified":"2026-07-15T10:41:50.645Z","description":"Using maximum effort/thinking tokens in AI coding agents is often wasteful. 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