Techniques
Chain-of-Thought (CoT)
Also known as: cot, step by step
In one line
Asking the AI to reason step-by-step before giving its final answer.
What does Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mean?
CoT prompting improves reasoning by forcing the model to write intermediate steps. Modern reasoning models (o3, Claude with extended thinking, Gemini 2.5 Pro) do this internally.
A real-world example
Adding "Think step by step, then give the final answer." to a maths problem.
Related terms
Prompt Engineering
The craft of writing prompts that get accurate, useful answers from AI.
Few-shot Prompting
Giving the AI a handful of examples in the prompt so it copies the pattern.
Reasoning Model
A newer class of LLM that thinks internally before answering, trading speed for accuracy on hard problems.