Chain-of-Thought (CoT)

A prompting or generation technique in which a model produces intermediate natural-language steps before the final answer. These steps can improve performance on tasks that require composition, calculation, or decomposition, especially when the prompt provides suitable demonstrations.

The generated chain is a textual rationale and may rationalize an answer produced from other signals. It should not be treated as faithful proof of the internal process or as a substitute for verification. Critical production outcomes require external evidence, verifiable execution, or deterministic validation, while also protecting sensitive data that could appear in a trace.