Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Chain-of-thought prompting is asking an AI model to show its reasoning step by step before giving a final answer. Instead of "What's the answer to X?" you ask "Think through this step by step and then give me your answer." Chain-of-thought improves accuracy on complex reasoning tasks — math problems, logical analysis, multi-step decisions — because it forces the model to work through the problem rather than jumping to a potentially wrong answer. The instruction "think step by step" or "let's reason through this" at the end of a prompt often produces noticeably better outputs on complex tasks.