Chain of Thought
A prompting technique that asks an AI to reason step by step before giving a final answer.
Chain of thought prompting encourages a model to show its reasoning process before arriving at an answer. Instead of jumping straight to a conclusion, the model works through intermediate steps — which often leads to more accurate results on complex tasks.
Think about how a maths teacher asks you to "show your working." The final answer matters, but the steps reveal whether you understood the problem or just guessed. Chain of thought does the same for AI — forcing it to reason through the problem makes errors easier to spot and correct.
Chain of thought doesn't guarantee correct reasoning. A model can produce a plausible-sounding chain of steps that leads to a wrong answer. The steps can look logical while being subtly flawed — a phenomenon sometimes called "reasoning theatre".