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n. / Prompts and context
Chain of thought
Definition
Chain of thought is having a model work through a problem in written intermediate steps before giving a final answer. It often improves results on tasks with several steps, such as math or planning.
In more detail
You can ask for it in the prompt, or use a reasoning model that does it on its own. It costs extra output tokens and time, and the written reasoning is not always a faithful account of how the answer was reached, so treat it as a useful aid for debugging rather than proof.
Example
Prompt: "Think through the discount rules step by step, then give the total." The reply lists each rule it applied, then states $84.50.
