Reasoning Economy

Core rule

Spend reasoning where it prevents rework. Cheap thought before a risky action is usually cheaper than repeated tool calls, repeated prompts, and repair rounds.

Practice

• Build a compact factual state ledger once; update it instead of re-explaining history.
• Keep stable instructions and reference material stable so provider cache prefixes can be reused.
• Read only the files/sections needed for the current decision; search before opening huge trees.
• Batch independent reads, but do not batch dependent writes.
• Before irreversible or high-rework actions, explicitly check assumptions, acceptance criteria, and rollback.
• Prefer one strong diagnostic experiment over many speculative edits.
• Compress old volatile tool output while preserving decisions, errors, hashes, and user constraints.

Reasoning economy does not mean “think less”. It means minimize total cost to a correct result: reasoning + input + output + tool calls + retries + user correction cycles.