Effort (low → max) trades generation depth for latency and cost per call. It maps to the provider's reasoning-effort control where supported.
Heuristics: front-end work (encoding, suite construction) benefits from high effort — a wrong contract poisons everything downstream. Bounded repair often does fine at lower effort because the unit is small and the verifier catches misses cheaply — iteration substitutes for depth. Per-agent in Advanced Mode; the Supervisor typically runs higher effort than the Operator.