| name | think-light |
| description | Cut reasoning-token weight. Use when thinking or reasoning tokens dominate the bill, when asked to cap a thinking budget, lower effort, or stop simple tasks from burning extended thinking. Light tasks get light thinking: matches thinking budget to task weight, then verifies accuracy held before keeping any cap. Never caps blind.
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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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
