In the context of coding agents, they do simulate “reasoning” when you feed them the output and it is able to correct itself.

I agree with “feel” and “believe” but what words would you suggest instead of “understand” and “reason’?

None. Don't anthropomorphize at all. Note that "understanding" has now been removed from the HN title but not the linked pdf.

Why not? We are trying to evaluate AI's capabilities. It's OBVIOUS that we should compare it to our only prior example of intelligence -- humans. Saying we shouldn't compare or anthropomorphize machine is a ridiculous hill to die on.

If you are comparing the performance of a computer program with the performance of a human, then using terms implying they both "understand" wrongly implies they work in the same human-like way, and that ends up misleading lots of people, especially those who have no idea (understanding!) how these models work. Great for marketing, though.

kool aid or not -- "reasoning" is already part of the LLM verbiage (e.g `reasoning` models having `reasoningBudget`). The meaning might not be 1:1 to human reasoning, but when the LLM shows its "reasoning" it does look _appear_ like a train of thought. If I had to give what it's doing a name (like I'm naming a function), I'd be hard pressed to not go with something like `reason`/`think`.