Effort Levels

Control how deeply Agent Nine thinks about your request.

How It Works

Agent Nine automatically adjusts its thinking depth based on your message:

Level	When it's used	Thinking
Min	Quick questions, simple commands	Instant response, no extended thinking
Low	Straightforward tasks	Brief analysis
Medium	Regular development tasks	Moderate analysis (default)
High	Complex problems, architecture decisions	Deep analysis with multiple approaches
Max	Critical decisions, large refactors	Maximum thinking with thorough evaluation

Auto-Detection

Agent Nine reads your message and selects the appropriate effort level:

Message	Detected Level
"What's the time?"	Min
"Rename this variable"	Low
"Fix the login bug"	Medium
"Design a caching strategy for our API"	High
"Refactor the entire auth system, consider security, performance, and backwards compatibility"	Max

Keywords that increase effort:

• "think carefully", "analyze deeply", "consider all options"
• "important", "critical", "production"
• "architecture", "design", "strategy"

Manual Override

You can override the auto-detected level by being explicit:

Quick answer: what's the default port for PostgreSQL?

Think deeply about the best approach to migrate our database
from MongoDB to PostgreSQL. Consider data integrity, downtime,
and rollback strategy.

What Changes With Effort

Aspect	Low Effort	High Effort
Thinking time	Milliseconds	Seconds to minutes
Approaches considered	First viable	Multiple alternatives
Error checking	Basic	Thorough edge case analysis
Code quality	Working solution	Optimized, well-structured code
Explanations	Brief	Detailed with reasoning

Tips

• Don't always use max — simple tasks are handled faster and better with lower effort
• Be specific about complexity — if a task is more complex than it looks, mention it
• Natural escalation — if the first answer isn't deep enough, say "think about this more carefully"