Chain-of-Thought Prompting, Explained (with the Research Behind It) (opens in new tab)

If you've ever typed "let's think step by step" into ChatGPT and watched the answer quality jump, you've already used chain-of-thought prompting without knowing it. That phrase isn't magic — it's a deliberate technique backed by peer-reviewed research. What It Is Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting instructs an AI model to reason through a problem step by step before delivering its final answer. Instead of predicting a response in one leap, the model generates a sequence of intermediate reasonin...