Practical guidance on the controls that shape how many tokenThe chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.Full definition → Claude spends reasoning, so you can trade cost against quality on hard engineering tasks.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
test-time compute — Spending more computation when the model answers — thinking longer, trying multiple attempts — to buy accuracy without training a bigger model.
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
