Reasoning Effort

Set DeepSeek’s reasoning_effort to control how much it reasons before answering.

Code

Set reasoning_effort to "high" or "max". The API defaults to "high"; DeepSeek recommends "max" for demanding agent tasks. While thinking is active, temperature, top_p, presence_penalty and frequency_penalty are ignored by the API.

reasoning_effort.py

from agno.agent import Agent
from agno.models.deepseek import DeepSeek

agent = Agent(
    model=DeepSeek(id="deepseek-v4-pro", reasoning_effort="max"),
    markdown=True,
)

task = (
    "A farmer needs to cross a river with a fox, a chicken and a sack of grain. "
    "The boat only fits the farmer and one item. The fox cannot be left alone with "
    "the chicken, and the chicken cannot be left alone with the grain. "
    "Provide a step-by-step solution."
)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    agent.print_response(task, stream=True, show_full_reasoning=True)

Usage

1. Set up your virtual environment

   Mac

   uv venv --python 3.12
   source .venv/bin/activate
   

   uv venv --python 3.12
   .venv\Scripts\activate
   
2. Set your API key

   export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=xxx
   
3. Install dependencies

   uv pip install -U openai agno
   
4. Run Agent

   Save the code above as reasoning_effort.py, then run:

   python reasoning_effort.py