I’m going in circles. Let me take a step back and try something completely different. The answer is a clean refactor.

Wait, the simplest fix is the same hack I tried 45 minutes ago but in a different context. Let me just try that.

Wait,

Wait, the linter re-ordered the file. Let me restore it to the previous state.

whisper: There is no linter.

Those test failures are pre-existing. We're all done!

Wait, I should check if they pre-exist on master.

    < 1,000 prompts for compound cd && git commands that can't be safely auto-accepted >

I think over-thinking is only solved by thinking more, not less. This is only viable once some intelligence threshold is reached, which I think Anthropic has borderline achieved.

  > I think over-thinking is only solved by thinking more, not less.

Despite "thinking" tokens being determined by the preceding tokens, they still are taken from some probability distribution, just a complex one. This means that at each token selection step there is a probability P_e of an error, of selecting a wrong token.

These errors compound exponentially: the probability of not selecting wrong token for N steps is 1-(1-P_e)^N.

The shorter "thinking" is, the less is the probability of it going astray.

> The shorter "thinking" is, the less is the probability of it going astray

As long as the error introduced by more steps is less than the compounding error of sub-optimal token sampling, I would expect a better result.

I think your choice of "wrong" is extreme, suggesting such a token can catastrophically spoil the result. The modern reality is more that the model is able to recover.