How thinking effort trades depth for speed

/effort low, medium, or high trades depth of reasoning against speed directly. A higher effort level means the model spends more time reasoning through a decision before acting on it.

That additional deliberation tends to reduce the number of wrong turns and follow-up corrections a task ends up needing overall, at the cost of each individual step taking somewhat longer to complete.

For a task you already know is genuinely simple, a lower effort level often finishes faster overall with no real difference in the outcome, since there is little for the extra deliberation to catch. See Thinking process for the full explanation of what each level actually changes.

The added time from a higher effort level shows up as slightly longer pauses before each tool call, not as additional tool calls themselves; it is not that high effort does more steps, it is that it spends more time deciding which step to take.

In practice the difference per individual step is usually small enough not to be the dominant factor in a turn's total time; the number of tool calls a task genuinely needs still matters more than the effort level applied to deciding each one.