Thought-Based Reasoning

Overview

Core principle: Making reasoning explicit improves accuracy 20-70% on complex tasks.

Instead of jumping to answers, decompose problems into steps. This catches errors, enables backtracking, and produces verifiable reasoning.

When to Use

digraph decide {
  "Problem type?" [shape=diamond];
  "Direct answer worked?" [shape=diamond];
  "Need confidence?" [shape=diamond];
  "Use direct prompting" [shape=box];
  "Use Zero-shot CoT" [shape=box];
  "Use Self-Consistency" [shape=box];
  "Use technique from table" [shape=box];