Skills2026-06-24 · source-backed
Stop writing "let's think step by step" on frontier reasoning models.
Story
On 2026 reasoning models (Opus, o3, Gemini, R1) the chain-of-thought runs in dedicated hidden tokens, so the old incantation does nothing or actively degrades output by redirecting reasoning that already exists. Direct the reasoning instead: state your decision criteria, constraints, and what "good" looks like, and let the internal deliberation work. Clean inversion of a habit most senior people still carry from the GPT-3.5 era (source).
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