I have a fun little agent in my tmux agent orchestration system - Socratic agent that has no access to codebase, can't read any files, can only send/receive messages to/from the controlling agent and can only ask questions.

When I task my primary agent with anything, it has to launch the Socratic agent, give it an overview of what are we working on, what our goals are and what it plans to do.

This works better than any thinking tokens for me so far. It usually gets the model to write almost perfectly balanced plan that is neither over, nor under engineered.