Comment by jolux

3 days ago

what do you mean by reset at every turn? context stays until compaction. if you remove the reasoning tokens after every turn you will be constantly blowing cache which is far worse than filling up context.

That's not my understanding of how most agents work. This is what a chain of request/response looks like:

  Your Prompt 1: Prompt Content 1 -> cache-1
  LLM Response 1: <Thinking>Thinking Content 1</Thinking> Response Content 1
  Your Prompt 2 (client side): prompt-1 + response-without-thinking-1 + Prompt Content 2
  Your Prompt 2 (server side): cache-1  + response-without-thinking-1 + Prompt Content 2 -> cache-2
  LLM Response 2: <Thinking>Thinking Content 2</Thinking> Response Content 2
  Etc...

So reasoning gets dropped from context and you still get cache from the accumulating requests.

Edit:

I've realised I was incorrect, the thinking doesn't get passed back and forth but the latent snapshot does which result in using memory just the same.

  • Modern protocols loop back the reasoning tokens in raw textual form via an encrypted parameter. You can't see them (modulo the recent attack), but you do resubmit them.

    • Yeah I've done more research and that's what I meant in the edit you replied to.

      But that's not the full reasoning token context, just a snapshot of the latent state at the end of it, no?

      Have a look at the gemini ones they're pretty small.

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