Chain of Thought

A prompting technique in which a model is elicited to produce intermediate reasoning steps before its final answer, improving accuracy on multi-step problems.

Reasoning traces are the substrate of agent planning; an agent that reasons step by step before acting makes more reliable tool calls on the agentic web.

term
Chain of Thought
category
core
short_def
A prompting technique in which a model is elicited to produce intermediate reasoning steps before its final answer, improving accuracy on multi-step problems.
long_def
Chain-of-thought (CoT) makes the model 'show its work' — laying out the sub-steps of a calculation or deduction — which raises performance on arithmetic, logic and planning tasks. Modern reasoning models internalize this behavior, spending inference-time compute on a reasoning trace before answering.
see_also
react-pattern ai-agent context-engineering
etymology_origin
— verify-against-primary-at-build ↗ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering — 'chain-of-thought prompting' named by Wei et al., Google, 2022
related_to
react-pattern ai-agent agentic-loop
contrast_with
Unlike a direct answer, chain-of-thought first generates the reasoning steps, trading extra tokens for higher accuracy on problems that need more than one step.
example
Asked a word problem, a model prompted for chain-of-thought writes out each step and only then states the total, catching errors a one-shot answer would miss.
source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering
status
active
why_it_matters
Reasoning traces are the substrate of agent planning; an agent that reasons step by step before acting makes more reliable tool calls on the agentic web.
sameAs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering
bridge_entity
ai-agent
last_verified
2026-07-06
md_twin
/glossary/chain-of-thought.md

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