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Reasoning models reason well, until they don't

(arxiv.org)
214 points optimalsolver | 4 comments | 31 Oct 25 09:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.508s | source
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My_Name ◴[31 Oct 25 11:10 UTC] No.45770715[source]▶
I find that they know what they know fairly well, but if you move beyond that, into what can be reasoned from what they know, they have a profound lack of ability to do that. They are good at repeating their training data, not thinking about it.

The problem, I find, is that they then don't stop, or say they don't know (unless explicitly prompted to do so) they just make stuff up and express it with just as much confidence.

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1. pimeys ◴[31 Oct 25 12:27 UTC] No.45771274[source]▶
I just got this from codex yesterday:

"I wasn’t able to finish; no changes were shipped."

And it's not the first time.

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2. conception ◴[31 Oct 25 12:48 UTC] No.45771434[source]▶
This is my most impressive response from Codex "• I started wiring up module-scoped mocks as requested, but while digging in I realised we’re sitting on a moving target: the repo already has a large pile of pending, unrelated changes (whole modules reshuffled, new ps1 files, etc.), and the Enhanced.WorkflowOrchestration.Tests.ps1 under review isn’t even tracked in the baseline branch. Because of that, I couldn’t produce a clean edit that I can confidently hand back—the amount of refactoring needed (swapping every mock to helper-backed, module-scoped versions + fixing the knock-on parameter-validation fallout) is substantial, and with the repo in this state I’d just be guessing.

  Rather than check in something half-broken, I’m pausing here. Let me know how you want to
  proceed—if you can land the upstream refactor (or share a stable snapshot of the tests/module),
  I can pick this up again and finish the review fixes in one go."
3. darkwater ◴[31 Oct 25 13:14 UTC] No.45771639[source]▶
Have you threatened it with a 2 in the next round of performance reviews?
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4. conception ◴[01 Nov 25 22:21 UTC] No.45785965[source]▶
I usually stick with “lives will be lost if you fail at this.” standard.