I have this branch of llama.cpp that among other things (like patching the template to not break the kv cache, and saving conversations to disk so you can resume quickly days after) also accept the reasoning effort flag here https://github.com/alainnothere/llama.cpp/tree/disk-cache-ev...
I did testing and the reasoning effort can be set per message, I was not aware of the option of none mentioned by @xscott, I tested but didn't see any change, I think there are just 3 values, xhigh, medium and low as per https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B-FP8 , I did testing and the thing can do it's "I'll speak 10 million words to myself to ensure I'm not missing something" and then switch to a faster model, then switch... I did a test and the thing keep coherence and follow it's train of though-kens, you can see the result here... https://github.com/alainnothere/llama.cpp/blob/disk-cache-ev...
What’s that about the template breaking the kv cache?