Extended Thinking
Also called thinking mode, thinking budget, reasoning effort.
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.
Sources
- Anthropic (2025). Building with extended thinking.
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Extended Thinking. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0085). https://protologue.com/t/extended-thinking/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_extended_thinking,
title = {Extended Thinking},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0085},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/extended-thinking/}
}