AI Glossary / Chain-of-thought

⌨️ Prompts

Chain-of-thought is a technique where the model writes out its reasoning step by step before giving an answer. A simple "what is" becomes a sequence of intermediate conclusions - and this clearly improves results in logical, mathematical, and multi-step tasks. It used to be triggered by simply adding "think step by step"; today the best models have built-in reasoning modes that do this automatically and much more deeply. Remember that written-out reasoning is still generated text - it sounds convincing even when it contains an error.