AI Glossary
What is Chain-of-Thought?
A prompting technique that instructs an AI to reason step-by-step before giving a final answer, improving accuracy on complex tasks.
Chain-of-Thought explained
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is one of the most powerful prompt engineering techniques. By asking the AI to "think step by step" or "reason through this before answering", you get more accurate results on math, logic, and multi-step reasoning tasks. Modern reasoning models like OpenAI o1/o3 and Claude's "extended thinking" have chain-of-thought built in. For other models, adding explicit CoT instructions to your prompts significantly improves quality.
Frequently asked questions
What is chain-of-thought prompting?
Chain-of-thought is a prompting technique where you ask the AI to reason step-by-step before giving its final answer, which improves accuracy on complex or multi-step tasks.
How do I use chain-of-thought prompting?
Add phrases like "Think step by step", "Reason through this carefully before answering", or "Show your work" to your prompts. This is especially effective for math, logic, and analysis tasks.
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