No there is reasoning in LLMs. This is actually proven through several scientific papers.

I can't say whether it's using reasoning for specific answers. I'm sure many times it just regurgitates something that is known... But saying that LLMs in general can and do reason is categorically true. LLMs do attempt to extract actual mental models of the subject of the text.

See here:

- GPT style language models try to build a model of the world: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382

- GPT style language models end up internally implementing a mini "neural network training algorithm" (gradient descent fine-tuning for given examples): https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559

For your specific case, given the conditions, another explanation that fits as well is that the LLM simply needs more data to build a more complete model for elixir. Once it does that I'm sure it can respond with completely novel elixir code as it already does with python.