Glossary
Chain-of-Thought (CoT)
A prompting technique where the model explains its reasoning step by step.
Definition
Chain-of-thought prompting instructs an LLM to work through a problem step-by-step in natural language before giving a final answer. It measurably improves performance on math, logic, and multi-step reasoning tasks.
Context
CoT was one of the first prompting techniques to reveal the reasoning capacity of large models. Modern models often perform CoT implicitly, but explicit CoT still helps for hard problems. Recent reasoning-focused models (OpenAI o1/o3, Claude with extended thinking) built CoT into the model architecture, doing multi-step reasoning before returning an answer.