Effort pickers: turning up the heat on AI's newest control

Effort pickers are the newest control in AI tools. A small slider decides how hard the model thinks before it answers, and it now sits in almost every chat box. Most of them are a plain bar with a few labels.

Inspired by Beautiful UI, a library of interface components by the studio Turbo, we wanted to make this one more fun, almost like a game. The track is a bed of embers. Drag it from Low to Max and the flames grow, while the temperature climbs from 650 to 1,500 °C.

Push it to Ultracode and the whole card catches blue fire, the hottest flame there is. Let go and the card closes, but the send button keeps burning, so you always know which mode you are in. Send a message and it lands at the top, with the loading state from the same library.

The fire is drawn by hand in a shader and kept small and slow, so it never gets in the way. Effort is an abstract setting, and a little heat makes it something you can feel.