think-light

Think Light

Reasoning tokens bill like output tokens, and models usually lock their answer early in the chain; the tail is often narration you pay for. Light tasks get light thinking. Save the heavy reasoning for the problems that are actually heavy.

Method

1. Sort your recurring tasks into two piles:
   • light: lookups, renames, formatting, single-file edits, commit messages, questions with one right answer. Extended thinking rarely changes these.
   • heavy: multi-file refactors, architecture calls, debugging across boundaries, anything where the first idea is usually wrong. Thinking earns its tokens here.
2. Cap the light pile. Use your agent's thinking controls: effort levels, a thinking-budget setting, or per-request flags. Cut the budget hard for light tasks; leave heavy tasks alone at first. Prefer per-session or per-request controls: a cap written into settings outlives the task, and a cap in project settings caps your teammates too. Never ship a cap in shared config.
3. Verify before keeping. Rerun two or three recent real tasks from the capped pile and compare results against what you got uncapped. Same quality: keep the cap. Worse: raise it back and say so.
4. Log what you capped and the before/after spend in the weigh-in log, so the saving is a receipt, not a feeling.

Hard Rules

• Never keep a cap you did not verify on real tasks.
• Caps are per task type. A global cap is a blind cap.
• If quality dropped, the cap loses. Raise it back without ceremony.
• Record the cap and the saving. Unmeasured savings do not exist.