Chain-of-thought

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is prompting the model to lay out its reasoning before giving the final answer. It’s a large, well-documented boost on multi-step problems.

• “Let’s think step by step.”
• “Show your work, then give the answer.”
• Few-shot CoT: include examples that already show reasoning.

It works because breaking a problem into steps lets the model use intermediate results.