Thinking Directive Modes

This reference lists the Thinking directive modes on the Tier Map of a PaletteAI Inference Launchpad appliance, the effort levels, how each engine family interprets the level, and the console states that override the setting. For the concept behind the directive, refer to The Thinking Directive. For the steps to set the directive, refer to Set the Thinking Directive for a Tier.

Modes

Mode	Authored value	What the model does
off	off	The model does not reason. It answers each request directly.
on	on	The model reasons at medium effort. Equivalent to effort:medium.
effort	effort:<level>	The model reasons at the chosen level. Each level maps to the model's native effort control on the engine.

Effort Levels

Level	Authored value	Relative depth
low	effort:low	Shortest hidden phase the model supports.
medium	effort:medium	Default depth. Selected by a bare on.
high	effort:high	Deeper reasoning than medium.
xhigh	effort:xhigh	Deeper reasoning than high.
max	effort:max	Deepest hidden phase the model supports.

Per-Engine Interpretation of Effort

Engine family	How the level is treated
Anthropic frontier	Every level takes effect. Reasoning depth rises monotonically from low to max.
OpenAI frontier	Each model version supports its own set of levels. A level deeper than the model supports reduces to the deepest supported level.
Local models	Only on and off are honored. Most local models do not read a graded level.
Engines with no reasoning surface	The directive is accepted and ignored. The row shows the ignored chip.

Console States That Override the Setting

State	When it appears	Effect
off is disabled	The tier resolves to an OpenAI o-series or GPT-5 family model.	The selector does not offer off for that tier.
Grey chip reading ignored — no thinking surface	The tier's resolved model runs on an engine that has no reasoning surface.	The engine ignores the directive; the request is served normally.

Thinking Values on Semantic Routing Rules

Each rule on the Semantic routing card has a Thinking column, which offers the following values.

Value	What the rule does
Inherited	Uses the depth set on the Tier map alias that handed the request to the semantic router. The rule shows it as from tier map: <level>.
off	Turns reasoning off for this rule, whatever the alias says.
on	Turns reasoning on for this rule, whatever the alias says.
effort	Sets the reasoning level for this rule to low, medium, high, xhigh, or max, whatever the alias says.