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The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

patrickmccanna.net

91–100 of 248 posts

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#91

All this effort to hide thinking and opus 4.8 after 100k-200k tokens starts to leak it's own thinking. It's comedy really.

Oh man that’s only happened to me a few times but the result is so disorienting, especially since I’m usually jailbreaking it for security.

Pages of “I have to be careful, the user is asking that I do something related to cybersecurity that could easily be turned around and used offensively” but then happily gives me what I wanted.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also a typo in the last sentence you're vrs your

Weirdly pleasant, if minor, signal of human authorship

Yeah, definitely it's a nice thing in today's context, weirdly. But also, you shouldn't really be making typos if you're writing an article and are using a basic spellcheck.

The text is clearly human-written just because it doesn't smell like AI (in this case, even if it was written by AI and produced this particular output, that's okay imo). I deal a lot with AI writing and writing in general, as I worked as an editor in another life so it's natural to me to see writing and form an objective opinion on it.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#93

I believe that chain-of-thought reasoning blocks don't really correspond to what humans think of as reasoning. (See section 6.2.2 of the Fable/Mythos system card about "illegible reasoning", and the questions raised by the Apple paper on "The illusion of thinking".) I assumed they obscure the reasoning blocks because if users saw what's going on they'd be alarmed. Just as I'd probably be alarmed if I saw what was rea…

[dead]

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#94

To be honest I thought the 'thinking' was the model being asked 'how did you come up with that' and then it generating a plausible explanation. I know at one point this was correct. Humans somewhat do the same - something that's been demonstrated in split-brain experiments.

> To be honest I thought the 'thinking' was the model being asked 'how did you come up with that' and then it generating a plausible explanation.

This evades an easy yes or no, so:

1. Many consumers believe reasoning-models allow that kind of question to be truthfully-answered, and their belief it reasonable given the marketing going on.

2. Implementers probably do not have the same belief when it comes to the terms mean or what capabilities they imply.

3. Yes, it doesn't actually do what the customer wanted it to do, which is a kind of retrospective introspection of internal thoughts and ideas.

____________

I advocate looking at everything from a document-generation perspective to cut down on traps and cognitive illusions. The "reasoning" models are a change in the style of document being iteratively-grown by the LLM, as opposed to something more anthropomorphized.

* Default: There's just the spoken dialogue between a Human Customer and Helpful Chatbot.

* "Reasoning": There's the spoken dialogue and a bunch of times the Helpful Chatbot character has an internal monologue. This provides more consistency between iterations, and can be mined by custom tools to call external code and insert results.

If your Human Customer character ask "Why did you say that", the LLM does not engage in a different process than "I have eaten an apple."

The LLM has no memories to consult or hidden goals to contemplate, it's the same process of finding more stuff that fits at the end of the document. Any benefits from a "reasoning model" is the LLM generates much better-looking additions because there's more (hidden) stuff for it to confabulate against.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#95
I feel like I get a lot of what this article presents as "hidden" by using this process:

- "Read `description` and create a specification, implementation guide, and checklist." - "Ask clarifying questions. If any of those questions has a clear best recommendation, please select that yourself and record that in "autorecommendations.md". - "Have codex and antigravity review each of these and work to consensus."

These are the core of ~61 lines of prompting I do across 3 prompts, and I feel like the resulting artifacts describe some of the thinking. Also, some of the back-and-forth between the models feels like it gives some insight into the model "thinking".

I will say: I heavily used Fable when it was available; Opus + loops + codex and/or antigravity review is better than Fable at building things.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#96
Claude Code 2.1.68 seems to have been the last version (before the "ctrl-o" debacle) which actually shows thinking inline. That + Opus 4.6 has been working great as a daily driver for me... all the new "safety" / "preventing misuse" pain points in the newer models and harnesses are so frustrating in comparison.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#97
Yep, its basically a scam to charge you more tokens and provide less compute.

You cant even guarantee WHAT model you get. Or if they downgrade you. Or if you 'offend corporate sensibilities' and they misdirect or lie.

The only way to get good returns on a model is to run it yourself. Quit paying for corporate bullshit.

Re: The text in Claude Code’s “Extended Thinking” output

#100

This is not just Anthropic. Almost all big AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, hide their model's actual reasoning. This is because revealing the raw reasoning exposes exactly how the AI processes information. These companies spend in huge amounts on R&D to develop a thinking process that is superior to their competition. Exposing those thinking mechanics to competitors would completely defeat the purpose of t…

There are actually fine tunes of qwen on opus “thinking” tokens that teach it to think like opus does.

https://huggingface.co/Jackrong/Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-...

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