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Comment by mholm | Hacker News Reader

This was true in the ChatGPT era. Now we're in a world with reasoning tokens, where a model can thoroughly plan out the response it wants to make. If anything, it makes the style worse.

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Yes, models can reason and plan, which helps them write more coherently. But when they write the final output, it’s still a single generation. It would be like letting a human make notes and write an outline, but not let them use the backspace once they start typing their response.

Presumably you could use the same reasoning trace, run multiple generations, and get different outputs (if the temperature is >0).

But now I’m interested in playing more with Cowork or Claude Code/Codex for prose writing to see if the set of tools there affects outputs at all. I guess you might need a more custom “writing” harness.

There's been a lot of effort into the writing space, and the models genuinely prefer this style. You can let them iterate on the same idea 100 times, rewrite sentences, determine what works best — and they'll still verb the noun, do rule of 3, and keep the same monotonous structure.

Isn't this just chain-of-thought though, doing the same thing multiple times without necessarily defining one path?

Chain of thought attempts to guide a single forward pass.

Reasoning tokens with tool calling tell the model to loop on a one phase of a question and call a tool to indications completion when done.

Related, but not the same thing.

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