[Bug]: o4-mini and o3-mini display no thoughts

[neubig]

Is there an existing issue for the same bug? (If one exists, thumbs up or comment on the issue instead).

• I have checked the existing issues.

Describe the bug and reproduction steps

When using OpenHands with o4-mini or o3-mini, they display no thoughts in the frontend.

This is confusing to users, who can not tell why the agent did what it did.

Thanks @kentyman23 for pointing this out.

OpenHands Installation

Docker command in README

OpenHands Version

No response

Operating System

None

Logs, Errors, Screenshots, and Additional Context

No response

[erkinalp]

NOTABUG: OpenAI Responses API (unlike the ChatGPT Web App API) does not expose chains of thoughts in the returned response.

[neubig]

I know the openAI API does not reveal the internal thoughts of the model, but from a user experience perspective we want to have an explanation of what the model is doing so the users can follow along. We need to find a way to fix this with o4 mini

[erkinalp]

The only way would be to use ChatGPT Web App API, but not even that shows raw CoT (OpenAI o-series models aren't trained to produce human-readable chain of thought responses, the reasoning trace shown in the Web UI is generated by a separate language model translating from ChatGPT gibberish into your language)

[erkinalp]

Soon-to-be-released open-weights release of the o3 series will have a human-readable chain of thought, but expect it to perform worse than the hosted version due to the post training required to make the chain of thought readable and policy-following.