Chain-of-Thought Prompting, Explained (with the Research Behind It)

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 intermedi...