Your AI Isn’t ‘Thinking Harder.’ It’s Just Burning More Tokens.
The ‘effort’ parameter in LLMs is not a measure of cognitive depth, but a strict token budget for internal reasoning steps. When the budget runs out, the model doesn’t care or noticeโit just stops. Users treat ‘high effort’ as a proxy for trust, but it’s merely an illusion of control that masks whether the AI’s hidden reasoning is actually complete.