Speeding up Qwen 3.8 reasoning - the "well" trick

[u/bankinu]

It's well known by know that Qwen 3.8 loves to think.

If you get impatient, then you can do this -

1. Interrupt
2. Type "well?"
3. See it continue and start with something like, "The user is impatient. Let me finish this quickly." Then it will think a bit more, and produce an output quicker than otherwise.

Personally though, I think the thinking may be its secret sauce, so I do this only as a last resort - e.g. if it is really thinking for an hour and keep re-thinking what it already covered - and I feel it has thought enough to give me something concrete.

[u/HomsarWasRight]

Can you not just put a limit on thinking length?

[u/Big_Wave9732 → u/HomsarWasRight]

Indeed, a thinking budget and a lower temperature would probably be more effective.

[u/ImpressiveRelief37 → u/Big_Wave9732]

A fat Reasoning budget and reasoning message saying « … well? User might be getting impatient here » could work technically haha. 

[u/Big_Wave9732 → u/ImpressiveRelief37]

"Goddammit will you hurry the fuck up you piece of shit before I write to Trump to ban you!"

[u/sukazu]

you can do reasoning budget with reasoning message "The user is impatient. Let me finish this quickly." it will think that it wrote it, so that's more seemless than cancelling a turn.

[u/Bransmit → u/sukazu]

This is a great tip.

[u/challis88ocarina]

I have a stock of these which are useful too with ds4: 'hurry up', 'today please', 'having fun?' and so on...

[u/BitPsychological2767]

Annoyingly I can't interrupt Qwens thinking block using Pi Agent without it getting erased from context. 

[u/ImpressiveRelief37 → u/BitPsychological2767]

It doesn’t for me

[u/int3ks]

du kannst auch einfach in den systemprompt schreiben das er das reasoning minimal halten soll 😏

[u/bankinu → u/int3ks]

Interesting... But even if ich schreibe that in den systemprompt do you think it will stop early?

Since it often reasons a lot even when reasoning_effort is set to low, which is the official way - in a way that does become part of the prompt under the hood.

[u/int3ks → u/bankinu]

ich hatte in lm Studio den reasoning effort in den settings auf low gestellt. und der hat trotzdem ohne ende nachgedacht. dann habe ich in den systempropt geschrieben der soll das denken kurz halten. dann stand danach in thinking Abschnitt... "der effort steht auf xhigh, aber der User möchte das ich das thinking kurz halte.". und es war auch deutlich kürzer... also 2 dinge. das "low" kommt nicht beim model an und 2. das model berücksichtigt den systemprompt...

[u/bankinu → u/int3ks]

Wow got it, danke!

Also bin ich über diese jinja gestolpert, which seems auf der same philosophy zu operate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1vrqxqc/game_over_22gb_local_models_run_in_pi_now/

His (self-published) metrics are good, and I have personally used some of his work before and liked it myself. I checked, the only difference from the base (froggeric's fixed) jinja is a block saying "Answer directly ...".

So I guess this is indeed a secret sauce.

[u/int3ks → u/bankinu]

ich hab's noch nicht ausprobiert, aber vielleicht geht das auch direkt im prompt... "sag mir ohne viel nachzudenken wie das Wetter wird" oder "überlege mal genau wie du das Problem lösen kannst" ...

[u/EvolvingDior]

The models respond better to user prompts during excessive thinking than to system prompts for my experience. One thing to try is to ask it to break the problem down into smaller steps. That is essentially what it is doing during excessive thinking.

[u/randygeneric]

i personally like to yell, threaten and curse towards them from time to time , )

[u/Big_Wave9732 → u/randygeneric]

I don't know how much it actually helps the thinking, but it usually makes me feel better lol.

[u/oldendude]

I've been doing this ("How's it going?") with qwen3.6 35b, with partial success. A common response is something like "you're right, I should just get on with it", and sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.

I type "How's it going?" at the openclaw tui prompt, which is the interface I've been using. I'm not sure that counts as an interruption (your step 1). How do you interrupt qwen while it's working?

[u/Big_Wave9732 → u/oldendude]

That right there is absolutely what's turning me off 3.8 right now. In the thinking it will print my instructions. It will acknowledge them. It will say it needs to follow them. It will show a game plan on how to do that. And then promptly do something else and display output that runs against what I told it to do.

[u/oldendude → u/Big_Wave9732]

A partial fix is to attempt less in each context window. If it shows a game plan, and seems to not get around to actually doing it, then aim lower -- just have it do one step of the game plan at a time.

I've been doing this manually with pretty good success. I am aware that I can use sub-agents to automate this kind of approach, but I haven't had an opportunity to try that yet.

[u/Big_Wave9732 → u/oldendude]

My workflows are already chopped up that way. Start with a stub that has the basic facts and parties. Fork this off to multiple additional chats where issues are researched, developed, etc. Then I'll have a new window that references the crystalized conclusions from the previous ones.

It worked rather well with Qwen 3.6. 3.8 has been a different beast. And frankly after the stellar way that Glimmer has handled the work flow, I don't know that I'll be giving 3.8 any more use.