← Concept IndexDEFINITION WHY IT MATTERS COMMONLY CONFUSED WITH
Chain-of-thought
Also called: step-by-step, showing work
Prompting a model to work through intermediate steps before answering. Producing the steps as text often improves accuracy on multi-step problems.
It's a cheap, reliable way to get better answers on anything with reasoning or arithmetic. But the written steps are a generated explanation, not a verified proof — they can look sound and still reach a wrong result.
A guarantee of correctness, or a window into how the model 'really' decided. The visible steps are themselves predicted text.