Pattern: The Reasoning-Effort Dial Has Become a Standard Coding-Agent Control Surface

Havoptic·high signal

Within four days, three harnesses shipped the same primitive: Anthropic expanded Opus 5's effort ladder to five levels and told users to sweep it, Antigravity CLI v1.1.5 (2026-07-21) added an `/effort` slash command to change reasoning depth mid-session, and Cursor Router (2026-07-22) exposed the same tradeoff as Intelligence/Balance/Cost routing modes. The convergence signals that per-request compute allocation, not model selection, is now the primary cost lever in agentic coding. Expect effort to become a first-class field in agent definitions and CI configs the way model IDs are today.