Claude and ChatGPT cut detailed reasoning traces
Hidden reasoning shifts human oversight from checking intermediate steps to judging only final outputs, which changes how teams should design review workflows. Practitioners who relied on traces for debugging or trust-building may need external evaluation tools instead. The anti-distillation motive suggests more labs may close reasoning visibility.
Ethan Mollick posted on X that Claude and ChatGPT have stopped showing detailed summarized thinking traces. He attributes the change to anti-distillation motives and UX decisions. Without visible reasoning, humans find it harder to weigh in on in-process AI work. Mollick argues this pushes usage toward automation rather than augmentation.
The end of detailed summarized thinking traces for Claude and ChatGPT (likely both anti-distillation & for UX) has made being a human in the loop challenging. It pushes us towards automation, rather than augmentation, as it has become much harder to weigh in on in-process AI work
