Asked about Reasoning, and improving a prompt honestly

Does chain-of-thought prompting still help?

An answer that works

It depends on the model. On older and smaller models it gives a real improvement on multi-step tasks. Newer reasoning models do it internally, and explicit instructions can interfere. The answer is to measure it rather than assume.

Reading an answer is not being able to give one. The section that teaches this is Reasoning, and improving a prompt honestly, 4 hours of Prompting.

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