{
  "id": "overthinking",
  "code": "PTL-0170",
  "term": "Overthinking",
  "aliases": [
    "overthinking problem",
    "excessive reasoning"
  ],
  "category": "failure-modes",
  "definition": "Overthinking is the tendency of reasoning models to spend far more reasoning tokens than a problem requires, for example writing long chains of thought for trivial arithmetic, which adds cost and latency with little or no accuracy gain.",
  "description": "Analysis of o1-style models found that later reasoning rounds on simple problems rarely contribute new solutions. Remedies include adjustable reasoning effort or budgets, routing easy queries to non-reasoning models, and training that rewards efficient reasoning.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "reasoning-model",
    "extended-thinking",
    "budget-forcing",
    "chain-of-draft",
    "test-time-compute-scaling"
  ],
  "introduced": 2024,
  "added": "2026-10-10",
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs",
      "authors": "Chen et al.",
      "year": 2024,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21187"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/overthinking/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Overthinking. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0170). https://protologue.com/t/overthinking/"
}