The Decoder summarized guidance from OpenAI's Vaibhav Srivastav on how to choose among GPT-5.6 Sol's reasoning levels. The model reportedly offers settings from Light to xhigh, along with Max and Ultra modes that can deploy multiple sub-agents in parallel.
The guidance reflects a growing cost-control pattern in advanced AI products: do not apply maximum reasoning to every task. Users and developers are being encouraged to match compute intensity to the complexity and value of the work.
For teams building with reasoning models, these controls could become central to latency, cost, and reliability planning.