AI Dictionary › Prompting
Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting technique that encourages the model to "think out loud," reasoning step by step before providing the final answer. It is typically activated by adding phrases like "reason step by step," "think before answering," or "show your reasoning" to the prompt.
This technique significantly improves model performance on tasks requiring multi-step reasoning: math problems, logical analysis, complex scenario evaluation, code debugging, or building legal arguments.
Ask the model to reason step by step before concluding: "think through this in numbered steps, then state the answer". The intermediate reasoning improves accuracy on logic, math and multi-constraint problems, and shows you where it went wrong.
"A client pays €2,400/quarter and we spend 11 hours/month on the account at €45/hour internal cost. Step by step: compute monthly revenue, monthly cost, margin, then answer: keep, renegotiate or drop?"
Calculations, eligibility rules, scheduling, any answer you would double-check by hand. Skip it for creative tasks: the steps constrain exactly what you want free.
Multi-turn prompting · JSON mode · Prompt scaffolding · Contrastive prompting · Context stuffing · Retry with backoff · Self-ask · Role prompting · Prompt injection · Temperature · System prompt
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