AI / Claude Sonnet5 Interview questions
When should you raise effort instead of prompting around shallow reasoning?
Raise effort directly, rather than adding compensating prompt instructions, when the observed problem is genuinely a reasoning-depth issue - the model is missing steps or reaching a shallow conclusion on a task that's objectively complex enough to warrant deeper reasoning.
Prompting around the issue, adding more explicit reasoning instructions without touching effort, is the better-suited fallback specifically when effort is constrained for other reasons, such as a hard latency requirement that makes raising effort impractical for that particular workload.
The underlying principle is that effort is the primary lever actually built for controlling reasoning depth, so it should be the first thing adjusted when reasoning quality is the issue, with prompt-level compensation treated as a secondary option for cases where the effort lever specifically can't be moved.
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