Surface resolved reasoning effort level when set to 'auto'
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Apr 9, 2026 by thamam Closed Apr 13, 2026
Problem
When reasoning effort is set to auto, the UI shows "auto" everywhere — but there's no way to see what effort level was actually used for each turn.
This makes it impossible to:
- Understand why a response was more/less thorough than expected
- Debug whether auto is making good choices for your workflow
- Correlate effort level with response quality or token usage
Current behavior
/effort autosets the mode- Status line shows "auto"
- Response metadata (JSONL session logs, API response) contains no
reasoning_effortorresolved_effortfield - The API response
usageobject has token counts but no effort indicator
Expected behavior
When effort is auto, surface the resolved effort level:
- In the UI — status line or response header, e.g., "auto → high"
- In session JSONL — include a
resolved_effortfield in the assistant message metadata - In the API response (upstream request to the Messages API) — echo back the actual effort level used in the response body
Even just (1) would be a significant improvement for observability.
Context
- The only indirect proxy today is thinking token count (more = likely higher effort), but that's a heuristic, not a definitive signal
- The effort parameter is currently request-only (
output_config.effort) with no echo in the response
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