[nl]

If you look at the "thinking" traces as ways of expressions of uncertainty rather than literal thinking they make more sense.

Consider debugging - you start off in one place, think you have worked out what is happening, and then there is a "oh but what about xxx" thing that happens and you explore another branch. Then you "have it for sure" until you find another edge case.

The LLM is doing something analogous. It's writing circuits to try to emulate your program. Each time it gets one that seems right it is very sure that circuit is correct, but then it finds another thing.

At any point you can stop and go "write code now" and it will, and the code will seems fine provided it hasn't hit one of these edge cases.

Turning up thinking time is literally forcing more exploration.

The words that come out are amusingly dramatic, but... TBH when I debug I often are like "WTF" and throwing my hands up in the air at some gotcha I didn't expect.