Glossary
What is chain of thought?
Asking a model to work through its reasoning before giving an answer.
Models produce better answers on multi-step problems when they generate intermediate steps rather than jumping to a conclusion. Recent reasoning models do this internally by default.
The visible reasoning is not a reliable account of how the answer was produced. It is text generated alongside the answer, and it can be confident and wrong.
It is still useful, because a wrong step is much easier to spot than a wrong conclusion.
In practice
Asking for the checks that would confirm a diagnosis, before asking for the fix, is chain-of-thought prompting applied to debugging.
Common questions
- What does chain of thought mean in one sentence?
- Asking a model to work through its reasoning before giving an answer.
- Why does chain of thought matter when you use Claude or ChatGPT?
- It is still useful, because a wrong step is much easier to spot than a wrong conclusion.
- Can you give an example of chain of thought?
- Asking for the checks that would confirm a diagnosis, before asking for the fix, is chain-of-thought prompting applied to debugging.
Related terms
- Prompt engineeringWriting the instruction so the model does what you meant.
- HallucinationA confident AI answer that is not supported by any real source.
- Context engineeringChoosing and shaping what an AI model sees, rather than rewriting the question.
- Glossary indexEvery AI context term, defined in plain language.
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