Claude Certification
Prompt Engineering & Structured Output
Lesson 5 · 7 min

Extended Thinking

When to enable thinking budgets and what they cost.

Extended thinking gives Claude scratchpad tokens before producing the final response. Use it for hard reasoning (math, multi-step planning, code analysis). Bill is on thinking tokens too; budget explicitly.

Quick check
Prompt EngineeringSelect one
How many few-shot examples typically peak performance?