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40 XP

Lesson 5 · 11 min

Chain-of-thought & reasoning

"Think step by step" — and when it actually helps.

The most overrated trick in the book

Chain-of-thought (CoT) means asking the model to reason out loud before answering. The classic phrasing: "Let's think step by step."

It sometimes helps a lot. It often does nothing. And on modern models with built-in reasoning (Claude Opus 4, GPT-o-series), it can hurt by interfering with their internal reasoning.