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by canpan 8 days ago
One big pain point is not seeing the thinking trace. I noticed using pi with a self hosted model that I could spot, stop and correct my prompt much faster. With claude etc I have to first wait for it to think 3 minutes and then notice it got completely off the path I wanted.

I still use a plan, because my local model is not as smart as opus, but I can iterate much faster.

2 comments

I’ve seen people have success figuring out model reasoning by adding a required `reasoning` parameter to tool calls. Might be worth experimenting with this for the `write` tool call in a coding agent harness.
Also "divide and conquer" is still applicable. Tired of waiting 10 minutes for the model to come up with a plan that ends up being wrong? Divide the problem into pieces and attack the pieces individually, worst case scenario the model spends 2 minutes and got some detail wrong, but way easier to correct the tiny stuff.

Once you've done with the pieces, do one "integrate them together" part, then you have a fully formed plan with less chance of wrong stuff in it. Yes, this requires a bit more interactivity than "prompt model then come back after making and drinking a coffee", but personally I prefer that.

this so true. its really hard to make sure a model isnt going off the rails if i dont see full cot. the fact that oai and anthropic models hide it now has made them less reliable. which is a shame
The great news is you can use DS-V-Pro, MiMo-V2.5-Pro, GLM-5.2, or K3 and see everything.

I tend to use 5.6-Sol now more for one shot type of tasks where all I want is the answer and I’m not going to read the reasoning.

5.6 sol is pretty good, its definitely very very well tuned, i'm not quite sure which of the others i should use near term, but theyre doing great work