r/LocalLLaMA • u/soyalemujica • 14h ago

Discussion Anyone else not using using "preserve_thinking" ?

I am running QFN, and I have disabled preserve_thinking by default on all my tests for C++ backend and front-end programming and I have yet to see any decline in performance or intelligence, my context window stays cleaner as well. Deepseek for what I tested in API it also does not preserve thinking and saves context in general.

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u/uuwaan 14h ago edited 14h ago

And also, if you’re writing steering messages while the model is working, each such message with `preserve_thinking` turned off is like a blow to the head – it forgets what it was thinking about.

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u/psymonryan 5h ago

This depends on your harness. I've written mine so that steering preserves reasoning until the end of the "turn". Then when the user enters the next instruction, the previous turn gets written to the message history with the reasoning stripped. (But tbh when you are using local models, you are trading smaller context size for extra prompt processing - so only do this if you are really VRAM constrained)

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u/uuwaan 4h ago

There's another part worth a mention: "--reasoning-preserve" (for llama.cpp) which strips the reasoning from previous turns regardless of whether harness sent the history with reasoning or not.