Prompting glossary
Chain of thought
Asking the AI to work through steps.
What it means
Chain of thought asks the model to reason step by step before answering, which helps on planning, comparison and arithmetic-style tasks. Ask for the reasoning to be brief, or you get pages of thinking around a short answer.
Also called
step by step reasoning
How to use this in practice
Knowing the word is the easy half. The useful half is writing the instruction so the AI does not have to guess: say who it should act as, give it the background it cannot know, state the outcome you want, set the limits, and name the format the answer should come back in. That is the same structure behind every template in the free prompt library.
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