> That isn’t the model reasoning. That’s you figuring out exactly what parameters you need to use to make the model give the result you want.

If its to get the model to present a fixed answer, sure.

If its to get a model to do a better job at solving general classes of problems (such as when what you are optimizing is the built-in prompt in a ReAct/Reflexion implementation, not the prompt for a specific problem), that's, at a minimum, different from Clever Hans, even if its not “reasoning” (which is ill-defined).

As always, it's unclear on which side of the keyboard the intelligence lies.