AI glossary · Prompts and settings
Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT)
Chain-of-thought prompting asks an AI to work through a problem step by step before giving its answer, which often improves accuracy on harder questions.
Also called chain of thought, step-by-step prompting
In more detail
Writing out intermediate steps gives the model room to reason instead of jumping to a guess. A simple “Think it through step by step” can help with maths, logic and planning.
Reasoning models do this automatically, so explicit chain-of-thought prompts matter less with them.
Example
“A shop sells pens at 3 for £2. How much do 12 pens cost? Work it out step by step, then give the final answer.”
Related terms
Reasoning modelA reasoning model is an AI model that works through a problem step by step before answering, which helps with maths, coding and complex questions.Prompt engineeringPrompt engineering is the skill of writing and refining prompts so an AI gives more accurate, useful and consistent results.Prompt chainingPrompt chaining breaks a big task into a series of smaller prompts, where each step’s answer feeds into the next.
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