What is…
Chain of thought
Having the model work through a problem step by step before giving its answer.
Asking a model to reason step by step — or using a reasoning model that does it automatically — improves accuracy on multi-step problems like math, logic, planning and debugging. The intermediate steps give the model room to catch mistakes.
With modern reasoning models you rarely need to type "think step by step"; just turn on thinking mode for hard problems.
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