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xianshoutoday at 2:13 AM6 repliesview on HN

From the file: "Answer is always line 1. Reasoning comes after, never before."

LLMs are autoregressive (filling in the completion of what came before), so you'd better have thinking mode on or the "reasoning" is pure confirmation bias seeded by the answer that gets locked in via the first output tokens.


Replies

joquarkytoday at 8:39 AM

For the more important sessions, I like to have it revise the plan with a generic prompt (e.g. "perform a sanity check") just so that it can take another pass on the beginning portion of the plan with the benefit of additional context that it had reasoned out by the end of the first draft.

stingraycharlestoday at 9:13 AM

Yeah this seems to be a very bad idea. Seems like the author had the right idea, but the wrong way of implementing it.

There are a few papers actually that describe how to get faster results and more economic sessions by instructing the LLM how to compress its thinking (“CCoT” is a paper that I remember, compressed chain of thought). It basically tells the model to think like “a -> b”. There’s loss in quality, though, but not too much.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13171

johnfntoday at 5:48 AM

Is this true? Non-reasoning LLMs are autoregressive. Reasoning LLMs can emit thousands of reasoning tokens before "line 1" where they write the answer.

show 3 replies
teaearlgraycoldtoday at 2:38 AM

I don't think Claude Code offers no thinking as an option. I'm seeing "low" thinking as the minimum.

ares623today at 3:41 AM

Ugh. Dictated with such confidence. My god, I hate this LLMism the most. "Some directive. Always this, never that."