The anthropomorphization of LLMs should be discouraged as much as possible. It perpetuates bad practices and encourages the use of these bots for tasks they are not intended for (particularly as chatbots).

Thinking traces should be treated as black boxes. There is no point in reading them. Only the LLMs’ conclusions are relevant. This is particularly true of Opus 5, which employs reasoning that seems highly questionable but very often reaches excellent conclusions (compared to its peers)

Sometimes I monitor thinking traces for misunderstandings (missing context / bad assumptions). If it's going to go off on a ~20 min task and I can catch it's going in the wrong direction in the first minute I save a lot of tokens and wasted time. I don't monitor the whole thing, mostly just the first bit to see if there was a gap or misalignment in intention.

As an aside, anthropomorphization has nothing to do with my motivations.

> The anthropomorphization of LLMs should be discouraged as much as possible.

And yet, they have extensive human-like behavior. If you treat them nicely or encourage them, they perform better.

Ignoring that human-like behavior is wrong headed.