[gilfoy]

It might actually help output answer with less nonsense.

As an example in some workflow I ask chatgpt to figure out if the user is referring to a specific location and output a country in json like { country }

It has some error rate at this task. Asking it for a rationale improves this error rate to almost none. { rationale, country }. However reordering the keys like { country, rationale } does not. You get the wrong country and a rationale that justifies the correct one that was not given.

[extr]

This is/was a great trick for improving accuracy of small model + structured output. Kind of an old-fashoined Chain of Thought type of thing. Eg: I used this before with structured outputs in Gemini Flash 2.0 to significantly improve the quality of answers. Not sure if 2.5 Flash requires it, but for 2.0 Flash you could use the propertyOrdering field to force a specific ordering of JSONSchema response items, and force it to output things like "plan", "rationale", "reasoning", etc as the first item, then simply discard it.

[mips_avatar]

But if it’s going to give itself a little pep talk can’t it just do that in a thinking token?