Problem
During a long wait, people cannot tell whether the assistant understood their request or is working on the wrong problem.
Solution
Show a brief summary of the assistant’s approach separately from the answer. Keep extra detail collapsed and show progress or elapsed time while work continues.
Make the summary specific enough to reveal a misunderstood request. Keep Stop available so people can interrupt and correct it.
Use a concise summary intended for display. Explain that it is a summary of the approach, not a complete record of the model’s internal computation or proof that the answer is correct.
Use when
A task takes long enough to need progress information, and a summary can help people spot a misunderstanding.
Don’t use when
The answer arrives in two seconds, or the task has no interesting intermediate state. A disclosure panel over a lookup manufactures the appearance of deliberation and slows the product’s felt speed for nothing.
Trade-offs
Extra explanation can distract people from checking the answer itself. A plausible summary can also create confidence without establishing accuracy. Long descriptions add reading work, so the collapsed view needs to be useful on its own.
Checklist
- Is it collapsed by default?
- Does the collapsed line carry enough for the viewer to catch a misread question?
- Is a duration shown, and is it the real one?
- Does the panel claim to explain why, or to show working?
- Can the viewer stop generation from inside the reasoning phase?
- Does reasoning count toward usage limits, and is that visible?
- Is the reasoning included when the answer is copied, shared, or exported?
- Does a screen reader get the summary without the whole trace?
- What happens when reasoning is longer than the answer?
- Is raw reasoning ever shown, and has anyone read a hundred samples of it?
Compare
Claude streams a summarised version of its reasoning by default and keeps the full trace behind an API setting. The panel is calibration for a reader, not a log for a developer. ChatGPT shows a running progress narration during longer reasoning, so the disclosure doubles as the progress indicator for the pre-answer wait. Gemini presents its reasoning as a structured plan more than a monologue, which is easier to skim and further from what the model actually did. Perplexity mostly spends this space on the search steps instead. Showing what it looked for is more verifiable than showing what it concluded.
Related
Streaming response presents the answer as it arrives. Tool call trace records actions and lookups. Citation chip links claims to sources.
Stop generation lets people interrupt the work. Response collapse hides detail within the answer itself.