What happens when you set effort to low on a genuinely complex problem?

Setting effort to low does not guarantee shallow, wrong, or skipped reasoning outright - Sonnet 5 can still recognize that a problem warrants more careful thought and reason accordingly even at low effort, though generally less thoroughly than it would at a higher effort level.

What's more likely to be visible is a quality gap on genuinely hard problems: if you observe shallow reasoning specifically on complex tasks run at low effort, Anthropic's guidance recommends raising effort to high or xhigh directly, rather than trying to compensate purely through more elaborate prompting.

If latency requirements mean effort has to stay at low even for a task with real multistep reasoning involved, the recommended workaround is to add explicit guidance in the prompt itself, describing the task as involving multistep reasoning and asking the model to think carefully before responding, rather than relying on effort level alone to signal that.

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