Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Chain-of-thought prompting is a technique intended to improve performance on problems that benefit from intermediate reasoning, such as multistep arithmetic, logic, planning, or decomposition. A prompt may include worked examples or ask the model to analyze a problem before answering. The visible explanation can help users inspect the approach, but it is not guaranteed to be a faithful record of the model’s internal computation and may still contain confident mistakes. For sensitive applications, the result should be checked against tools, evidence, or known answers. Modern reasoning systems may also perform hidden intermediate computation while returning only a concise conclusion or a short, user-facing explanation.