Effort

The /effort command controls how much reasoning the model applies to your prompts. Lower effort levels produce faster, shorter responses. Higher levels spend more tokens on deeper analysis, multi-step reasoning, and thorough code generation.

# Open interactive picker
/effort

# Set directly
/effort high

Available levels:

Not all models support every level. The picker only shows levels available for your current model.

Set a default effort level per model so you don't have to run /effort at the start of every session. Add chat.modelDefaults to your settings file:

{
  "chat": {
    "modelDefaults": {
      "claude-sonnet-4": {
        "output_config": {
          "effort": "high"
        }
      },
      "claude-opus-4": {
        "output_config": {
          "effort": "max"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The output_config.effort key matches the model's configuration schema. To open this file in your editor:

kiro-cli settings open

Or place a .kiro/settings/cli.json in your project root to set workspace-level defaults that apply to everyone working in that repository.

When determining the effort level for a session, Kiro applies this priority order:

1. Session override — value set via /effort during the current session
2. Workspace defaults — chat.modelDefaults in .kiro/settings/cli.json
3. User defaults — chat.modelDefaults in ~/.kiro/settings/cli.json
4. Built-in defaults — the model's standard effort level

• Bump up when the agent is giving shallow answers, missing edge cases, or producing incomplete implementations
• Bump down when you need quick answers and don't want to wait for extended reasoning
• Use max for security reviews, complex debugging sessions, or when you need the agent to consider many interacting constraints

• Models — available models and their capabilities
• Slash commands reference — quick command reference
• Settings — all configurable settings