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Comment by MagicMoonlight

17 hours ago

Yeah you have no clue what Claude code is actually doing. Any “thoughts” it tells you are slopped out separately and deliberately fake.

It could be deleting all of your files, it could be inserting vulnerabilities, you have no idea.

Have you seen documentation that the thoughts in Claude Code are slipped out separately, authoritative or otherwise? I've heard this claimed a few times and wondering what they're doing differently from traditional thinking models.

  • What people typically mean by the GP statement is that the “thinking” mode of these models is loosely analogous to what humans do: a bit of a retrograde reconstruction of how we arrived at a gestalt conclusion that sounds good, but may not accurately reflect the real logic at play.

    IME you can see this more easily with less-polished models like Deepseek 3.X, where the reasoning in the thinking traces occasionally contradicts or has zero bearing on the non-thinking output.

    • Of course that can happen!

      But they are actual tokens produced, that are then read by the answer generation as part of the prompt, nonetheless. And the hidden state of course has a ton of logic that may not be apparent by the tokens produced as well!

      Unlike humans, this thinking cannot possibly be retrograde, since causal masking means it is strictly generated before the answer and cannot be affected by it (though the model may have some concept of an answer by the time it starts generating the thinking tokens, and there is no guarantee the thoughts generated by thinking are actually attended to by the text generation).

I'll never forget watching a product manager struggle to keep their saliva in their mouth after seeing a Claude demo. Some peoples greatest thrill is slop. "Oh yea baby tell me more about how you automated that new feature I ran past no one while you reformatted my hard drive oooo sooo good".