I am slowly turning around on the idea of opaque reasoning tokens.

In principle, yes, I want total control and visibility into the reasoning process.

In practice, I find that it takes up so much time to DIY reasoning agents that I can't spend much energy on the actual application.

The model providers have way more resources and talent to do this right and keep it right over time. I am willing to concede this moat to them if it means I can actually focus on the business.

The more I think about it, the less I care to see those tokens. It feels an awful lot like obsession over logging every trace item an application could produce. Useful in theory but a nasty garage stacked to the ceiling with useless shit otherwise. What nefarious things are we concerned with? That they burn too many tokens in the black box? I'll threaten to move to a different black box. There are always options in a market with this many participants and big players feel this pressure. They know there's a point at which being evil bastards is no longer profitable.

Spending time carefully designing tools and views that interact with the environment in clean ways is a much better investment than trying to own and control 100% of the reasoning process or models.