From my experience, I suspect you'll need to be able to use both thinking modes (medium and xhigh).
I did set the default at medium, but the xhigh still seems to be a big part of its benefits.
I found it really easy to chat with it and instantly see flaws in its thinking when using the medium level of reasoning... in a way that had me consider that the frontier models reasoning abstractions (both at the harness level, e.g., claude code, codex) AND in the server-side obfuscation) that I found refreshing, because it made it easy for me to step in and precisely identify the failures of reasoning that the frontier models were getting stuck on, and because of the 'black box' hiddenness of their reasoning, it made it harder for me to diagnose.
So, I suppose I'm saying 'there is a time and place for each'.
I did set the default at medium, but the xhigh still seems to be a big part of its benefits.
I found it really easy to chat with it and instantly see flaws in its thinking when using the medium level of reasoning... in a way that had me consider that the frontier models reasoning abstractions (both at the harness level, e.g., claude code, codex) AND in the server-side obfuscation) that I found refreshing, because it made it easy for me to step in and precisely identify the failures of reasoning that the frontier models were getting stuck on, and because of the 'black box' hiddenness of their reasoning, it made it harder for me to diagnose.
So, I suppose I'm saying 'there is a time and place for each'.
Here is my setup: https://williamcallahan.com/blog/qwen-3-8-27b-is-a-great-ope...