Reasoning Techniques
Reasoning Techniques
Reasoning techniques (like Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thought) force the LLM to show its work. Large Language Models are statistical, not logical. By making them output a step-by-step reasoning path before the final answer, you allow the model to provide context to itself, significantly reducing logic errors and "hallucinations of calculation".
When to Use
- Math & Logic: Word problems, puzzles, navigation tasks.
- Complex Planning: "How do I move this couch through this door?"
- Legal/Medical reasoning: Deriving a conclusion from a set of rules and facts.
- Debugging: Asking the model to explain why code is failing before fixing it.
Use Cases
- Zero-Shot CoT: Simply adding "Let's think step by step" to the prompt.
- Few-Shot CoT: Providing examples of [Question -> Reasoning -> Answer] to guide the model.
- Self-Consistency: Generating 5 different Chain-of-Thought paths and picking the answer that appears most frequently (Majority Voting).
- Tree of Thoughts: Exploring multiple possible reasoning branches and backtracking if one leads to a dead end.
Implementation Pattern
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A structural pattern where multiple specialized agents communicate and coordinate to solve a problem that is too complex for a single agent. Use when user asks to "build a multi-agent system", "agents working together", "agent collaboration", or mentions team of agents, distributed agents, or swarm.
23reflection
A recursive pattern where an agent evaluates and critiques its own output to iteratively improve quality and catch errors. Use when user asks to "add self-reflection", "agent introspection", "self-critique", or mentions self-evaluation, meta-cognition, or quality self-assessment.
18human-in-the-loop
A hybrid pattern where the system pauses execution to request human approval, input, or disambiguation before proceeding with critical actions. Use when user asks to "add human approval", "require human review", "human-in-the-loop", or mentions approval workflows, human oversight, or escalation.
17planning
A high-level cognitive pattern where an agent formulates a structured sequence of actions (a plan) before executing any of them, ensuring goal-directed behavior. Use when user asks to "add planning to my agent", "task planning", "agent planning", or mentions plan generation, plan execution, or step-by-step planning.
14parallelization
A concurrency pattern where multiple agent tasks are executed at the same time to speed up processing or gather diverse perspectives. Use when user asks to "run agents in parallel", "parallelize tasks", "concurrent execution", or mentions parallel processing, fan-out, or batch execution.
13routing
A control flow pattern where a central component classifies an input request and directs it to the most appropriate specialized agent or tool. Use when user asks to "route between agents", "agent routing", "task dispatch", or mentions classifier routing, intent detection, or agent selection.
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