Colour the reasoning effort control so raised levels are obvious at a glance

[joshka]

Problem

When you switch between threads, it's easy to leave one on a higher reasoning level than the task needs, or a lower one than a hard task needs. The composer shows effort as grey bars or a grey word, which is easy to miss at a glance.

Proposal

Colour the effort control by cost, so a raised level stands out without reading it. Implemented in #28425:

• Low and Medium stay uncoloured, so normal levels don't draw the eye.
• High is amber, Extra High red, Max purple with ✦, and Ultra/Ultracode/Ultrathink fuchsia with ✦✦.
• In bars mode, Max and the Ultra levels become full bars plus sparkles instead of a word.
• Amber, red and purple avoid the red/green pair. Bar height and sparkles carry the level without colour.

Light	Dark

Open question: what if you change your default?

The PR colours by level, whatever your default is. If your default is High, every thread shows amber, because that's the cost you're paying.

The alternative is colouring relative to your default: your default is uncoloured, levels above it keep their colours, and levels below it are blue (flat, or fading toward plain text the further below). That keeps "uncoloured = my normal", but colours then mean different things on different setups. Mockups of both are below, for anyone who prefers the relative version.

Fixed colours, earlier ramp (blue Low)

Dark	Light

Relative: default Low (one blue vs fading)

Dark	Light

Relative: default Medium (one blue vs fading)

Dark	Light

Relative: default High (one blue vs fading)

Dark	Light

Relative: default XHigh (one blue vs fading)

Dark	Light

Relative: default Max (one blue vs fading)

Dark	Light

Relative: default Ultracode (one blue vs fading)

Dark	Light

Prior art: the same request for Codex Desktop in openai/codex#28558 and openai/codex#45898.

🤖 Claude Opus 5.5

[joshka]

Another open question: should the model get the same treatment? Picking a bigger, more expensive model is the same kind of easy-to-miss choice as a raised effort level.

Effort works with fixed colours because its levels have a clear order. Models don't share one scale across providers, so colouring them would need some notion of cost tier per model, for example from the catalog. One option is to colour only the top tier (the Opus-class or "max" models) and leave everything else plain, the same way Low and Medium stay plain here.

🤖 Claude Opus 5.5

[joshka]

From the PR:

@t3dotgg wrote

Closing because the effort colors and sparkles add visual noise to the composer. We want to keep the effort control visually simple.

I'm going to push back here as I understand this concern keep it calm, but I actually want this specific thing to be noisy. It's useful to tell me that I'm costing myself tokens, leading to using a subscription faster than anticipated. This is due to threads triggered by other threads with the wrong reasoning level, end of limit period token tokenmaxxing to use up limits, or defaults incorrectly applied. Either way, that cost should be visible in some way. Perhaps a setting would be worth it for those that don't care about this generally and just leave it off by default.