Chain of Thought Mastery

Force step-by-step reasoning to improve accuracy on complex multi-step problems.

Category: Engineering | Type: Skills

Skills: Chain of Thought, Reasoning, Accuracy

Techniques: Structured Output, Chain-of-Thought, Self-Verification

Prompt

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting forces the model to show its work. Technique: Add "Let's think step by step" to [your task/problem] or "Walk through your reasoning" to any complex prompt. Advanced CoT: 1. Break the problem into numbered sub-problems. 2. Require the model to solve each sub-problem before moving to the next. 3. Ask it to verify each step before proceeding. 4. Use "Wait — let me reconsider step N" to trigger self-correction. CoT increases accuracy on math, logic, and multi-step reasoning by 20-40%. The key insight: thinking tokens are compute tokens.

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