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For a personal project a while ago I peeked at Gemini's reasoning tokens in their coding CLI. I was pretty shocked. It was a bit like discovering Marvin (from H

For a personal project a while ago I peeked at Gemini's reasoning tokens in their coding CLI. I was pretty shocked. It was a bit like discovering Marvin (from Hitchhiker's Guide) was hiding in there all along. There was a lot of concern about my needs, "The user want's us to respond in a simple way...", "The user wants a clean front end...". Under the hood the poor model seemed very anxious to please with a hint of depression. It was a bit sad to see!

xg15 23d ago
For Qwen3.8, my first impression was weirdly Reni from TwoKinds: Immensely powerful but also apparently a ball of insecurities in the thinking traces. (which makes sense, as I think one motivation for reasoning traces is to explore different options and approaches. So it makes sense that there is a lot "but wait, let me reconsider" in them) What I found surprising is how strongly "logical contradictions" seem to influence the thinking trace. E.g. I had a situation where I accidentally copied a python file into a repo, but forgot to add a package that the file was depending on. Then I (somewhat carelessly) commited the file without ever testing it and gave the agent a task to work on the file. If I had run it in Python, I'd have gotten an "cannot resolve import" error and that would have been the end of it. Instead, the model went absolutely haywire. The thinking traces were full of utter confusion how the file could possibly resolve its dependencies - but at the same time, entertaining the possibility that a committed file may have an error was apparently Verboten. Hence, the model wrote up ever more outlandish theories how the file could resolve that package and in the end started to make tool calls outside the repo to explore the entire file system before I stopped it. Moral of the story: Underspecified requests are fine, but beware of anything self contradictory, it can easily send the Qwen model spiraling.

xg15 23d ago

For Qwen3.8, my first impression was weirdly Reni from TwoKinds: Immensely powerful but also apparently a ball of insecurities in the thinking traces. (which makes sense, as I think one motivation for reasoning traces is to explore different options and approaches. So it makes sense that there is a lot "but wait, let me reconsider" in them) What I found surprising is how strongly "logical contradictions" seem to influence the thinking trace. E.g. I had a situation where I accidentally copied a python file into a repo, but forgot to add a package that the file was depending on. Then I (somewhat carelessly) commited the file without ever testing it and gave the agent a task to work on the file. If I had run it in Python, I'd have gotten an "cannot resolve import" error and that would have been the end of it. Instead, the model went absolutely haywire. The thinking traces were full of utter confusion how the file could possibly resolve its dependencies - but at the same time, entertaining the possibility that a committed file may have an error was apparently Verboten. Hence, the model wrote up ever more outlandish theories how the file could resolve that package and in the end started to make tool calls outside the repo to explore the entire file system before I stopped it. Moral of the story: Underspecified requests are fine, but beware of anything self contradictory, it can easily send the Qwen model spiraling.