Tracing causal structure in LLM-generated text: a different lens on the Dallas circuit

The classic "Dallas" example from Anthropic focuses on an internal circuit in an LLM.I became curious about what the same underlying process looks like when viewed through the generated reasoning trace instead of hidden activations. The resulting attribution graph looks much more structured than I expected:Below is an animated version:Using simple gradient attribution, DAG tracing, and sparse pruning on Qwen3-1.7B, the resulting graph already resembles a 'reasoning trajectory'.This feels like a ...