Technique: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting
Chain-of-Thought prompting asks the model to show its reasoning step by step before arriving at a final answer. This dramatically improves accuracy on complex tasks — math problems, logic puzzles, multi-step analysis, and any task that requires sequential reasoning.
The magic phrase “Let’s think step by step” has been shown to unlock significantly better performance on reasoning tasks. By forcing the model to externalize its thinking process, you reduce errors from “jumping to conclusions” and make the reasoning transparent and verifiable.
When to use: Math and logic problems, debugging code, analyzing complex scenarios, strategic planning, root cause analysis, and any task where the path to the answer matters as much as the answer itself. If a human would need to “work through” the problem, use CoT.