Idk I feel like the more likely answer is to prevent distillation. Having the thinking is definitely better UX (oftentimes, I don’t know if Codex is just hanging, which it often does, or working in silence).
replyRunning some models locally and seeing these thinking tokens was quite the experience. I never saw an LLM so "unsure" about virtually everything.
replyI doubt most users would look at them if they were available. More likely they don’t want to stream distillation material.
replyI stay much more hands-on when I'm using models that display full reasoning traces. And I tend to get more things done as a result, because I know exactly when it thought of a good solution that it talked itself out of because of some invalid assumption.
replyCould be something very stupid like - "I don't have ffmpeg available here. Should I install it? No, I can't. I'll proceed doing something that will take me 100x more tokens and wall clock just to avoid adding a dependency." I can then just stop and say - you've got nix flake there, just add it.
That's impossible with western models. The only way is to ask why it did something stupid when it already spent 50% of your weekly quota and produced millions lines of slop.