What is Chain of Thought?
A prompting technique that encourages a language model to show its intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at a final answer.
Chain of thought (CoT) is a prompt engineering strategy where the model is guided—either explicitly or through demonstration—to articulate its reasoning process step by step. Instead of jumping directly to a conclusion, the model breaks a complex problem into smaller logical steps, improving accuracy on tasks that require arithmetic, multi-hop reasoning, or careful analysis. CoT can be elicited through zero-shot instructions like 'think step by step' or through few-shot examples that demonstrate the desired reasoning pattern. It forms the cognitive backbone of the ReAct loop in agent architectures.