Yeah the readability suffers, but as long as the actual output (ie the non-CoT part) stays unaffected it’s reasonably fine.

I work on a few agentic open source tools and the interesting thing is that once I implemented these things, the overall feedback was a performance improvement rather than performance reduction, as the LLM would spend much less time on generating tokens.

I didn’t implement it fully, just a few basic things like “reduce prose while thinking, don’t repeat your thoughts” etc would already yield massive improvements.