{
  "id": "extended-thinking",
  "code": "PTL-0085",
  "term": "Extended Thinking",
  "aliases": [
    "thinking mode",
    "thinking budget",
    "reasoning effort"
  ],
  "category": "test-time",
  "definition": "Extended thinking is a model mode in which the model generates a separate block of reasoning before its final response, with a developer-controlled setting that trades latency and cost for answer quality.",
  "description": "Early implementations exposed a fixed thinking token budget; newer Claude models replace it with adaptive thinking, where the model decides how much to reason under a chosen effort level. Vendor guidance for these modes favors high-level instructions about how to think over prescriptive step-by-step scripts.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "reasoning-model"
  ],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "scratchpad",
    "chain-of-thought"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Building with extended thinking",
      "authors": "Anthropic",
      "year": 2025,
      "url": "https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/extended-thinking"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/extended-thinking/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Extended Thinking. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0085). https://protologue.com/t/extended-thinking/"
}