Visible Reasoning

One of my favourite AI apps is the AI Agent Manus

Two of my favourite things are that it shows you what it’s thinking about, what it’s planning to do

And it lets you interrupt at any point to change its direction or ask it to do further tasks so you don’t have to wait for it to finish what it was doing before asking for more like you do with ChatGPT.

Perplexity Deep Research is another tool that I love and it also shows you what sources it’s looking at as it’s searching, what sort of questions it’s asking, what its next steps are.

More recently, I have tried the updated version of a tool called Spiral, which is an AI writing tool.

Amongst many other cool features, Spiral will show you its thoughts step by step and will assess whether it’s got enough material to be able to make a decision or write for you.

It will check that it’s got enough clarity and it will demonstrate its next steps, its research, the research type it wants to do, assessment of the content that you’ve given it, and it will ask you questions, show you research.

And it’s very much a back and forth conversation before you write anything rather than here is some generic AI slop.

Showing you all thinking and reasoning was something that was introduced into AI primarily to make it create the illusion for the human that something was going on behind the scenes.

If there was just a loading icon and then loads of text, our brain kind of thinks that the text isn’t really trustworthy or as in-depth as we would like.

We can take from this as humans and understand that this is what our audience wants.

There is so much information out there now, it is really hard for people to tell what is true and what isn’t.

Misinformation and myth-busting are two of the biggest things when it comes to health and fitness information in 2025.

So, it is no longer enough to show people this is what the information says. People won’t believe it. They get information blasted to them 24-7.

What we need to do is make our reasoning visible, show people how we came to the conclusions we did, whether that is through research, through our coaching experience, through qualification, through what’s worked for other clients.

The actual reasoning itself is probably less important than the reasoning being visible in the first place.