Chain of Thought

Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting strategy where you instruct the model to show its reasoning process before arriving at a conclusion. Instead of jumping straight to an answer, the model works through the problem step-by-step, which significantly improves accuracy on tasks that require logic, math, or multi-step reasoning.

You can trigger chain-of-thought reasoning with phrases like: "Think step by step," "Walk through your reasoning," or "Before writing the code, outline your approach." Some models (like Claude) support extended thinking modes that do this automatically.

For vibe coders, chain of thought is useful when asking the AI to make architectural decisions, debug complex issues, or plan a multi-file refactoring. Asking it to reason first produces better plans and catches edge cases the AI might otherwise miss.