how to disable reasoning/thinking with llama-server?

A user on LocalLLaMA surfaced a practical problem on April 13th: when running llama-server with certain models — particularly those trained with explicit reasoning or "thinking" steps baked into their output — there's no obvious configuration flag to suppress that internal monologue. The models, increasingly built around chain-of-thought architectures, want to show their work. The question is whether operators running inference servers actually want that verbosity in production, or whether they need clean, direct outputs without the cognitive scaffolding. The post scored modestly, suggesting either a niche audience or a problem that hasn't yet reached critical mass — possibly both.

If confirmed as a genuine gap in llama-server's configuration options, here is what this means. Developers building applications on top of locally-hosted models — customer-facing tools, pipelines where token efficiency matters, anything with latency constraints — need control over output structure. A reasoning model that insists on narrating its thought process burns tokens, increases response time, and can break downstream parsing logic that expects clean text. The second-order effect is strategic: as more capable thinking models get quantised and deployed locally through tools like llama.cpp, the gap between raw model capability and production-ready inference tooling becomes a real friction point. Someone has to solve this, either through model-level prompt engineering, server-side filtering, or an explicit configuration parameter — and right now it's not obvious which layer owns the problem.

Watch for a response from the llama.cpp maintainers or a community-contributed workaround that clarifies whether this is a known limitation, a planned feature, or simply a configuration step that isn't well documented yet.

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