AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is chain-of-thought prompting?
Chain-of-thought prompting (also called CoT prompting): A technique that asks a model to write out its intermediate reasoning steps before giving a final answer. Showing the work helps on maths, logic and multi-step questions, because each step conditions the next. It costs extra output tokens.
Chain-of-thought prompting: an example
'A shop sells 3 pens for Rs 45. What do 7 pens cost? Think step by step.' The model writes 45/3 = 15 each, then 7 x 15 = 105.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Chain-of-Verification
- Chat completions API
- Complexity-based prompting
- Context budget
- Context compression
- Context engineering
- Context stuffing
- Context truncation
Where you learn it
Chain-of-thought prompting is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.