zero-shot-cot-phrase-let-think-step-by-step

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Prompt_engineering-chunk-2-chunk-1.md

Created 2026-08-24T17:11:21+00:00

Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting (Kojima et al., 2022) uses the specific instruction 'Let's think step by step' appended to a question to elicit multi-step reasoning without providing worked examples.

Summary

Adding the simple phrase "Let's think step by step" to a question is enough to get a language model to break a problem into multiple reasoning stages, with no need to show it example answers. This matters because it establishes a low-cost, reliable baseline for triggering multi-step reasoning, and any system that builds on chain-of-thought techniques is implicitly depending on this trick working as observed.