When should you disable thinking on Claude Sonnet 5?

Disable thinking, using thinking: {"type": "disabled"}, for latency-sensitive workloads where reasoning adds delay without a corresponding quality benefit - streaming chat, simple classification, routing, or straightforward lookups are commonly cited examples.

It's worth noting that setting effort to low does not reliably achieve the same effect - the model can still reason on genuinely hard problems even at low effort, so low effort alone isn't a substitute for explicitly disabling thinking when the goal is truly no reasoning step at all.

Because thinking tokens draw from the same max_tokens budget as the visible response, disabling it also simplifies budgeting for these latency-sensitive workloads, since the full max_tokens allocation goes to the response text with no reasoning overhead to account for.

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