These were extremely helpful to read for insights on how to go back and retry different prompts instead, IMHO. I find it to be a significant step back in usability to lose those although I can understand the argument that they weren't directly useful on their own outside of that use case.

In the API, the thinking tokens are just a different stream. You can still read them.

They aren't, in the API too they're a thought summary, not nearly as useful as actually showing the thoughts. Anthropic still does provide raw thoughts to this day, showing how it's not necessary to keep a moat. Google and OpenAI don't.

[0] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/thinking#summaries

[1] https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/thoughts-are-missing-cot-not...

[2] https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/massive-regression-detailed-...

[2]

to be fair, Anthropic reasoning models don't have long thinking to begin with, and I find their reasoning pretty useless compared to what Gemini used to do.

Long thinking seems to be a marketing term without clear definition, only applicable to the opaque chat frontends. If you give Anthropic models a hard problem and set the thinking budget high (API), it does plenty of reasoning and the CoT helps a lot with debugging. With Gemini and OpenAI you can't debug as the summaries tell you effectively nothing about why it's giving a wrong answer or going off the rails when it does som

yes but I was referring to the Claude app which only shows a few sentences of thinking.