Comment by AlexErrant

Sebastian Raschka, author of Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch), commented on this:

> Reusing layers does not by itself suppress visible chain of thought. It adds computation in hidden states before the next token is emitted, just as ordinary transformer layers do. But based on the information we have, the only plausible interpretation here is that if a model uses more of these recurrent passes, it may need to generate fewer intermediate reasoning tokens.

https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2026/openai-astra-looped-t...