Chain-of-thought reasoning vs direct prompting — diminishing returns?

Question

CoT improves accuracy on math/logic, but adds 3x latency and token cost. For production systems, at what complexity threshold does CoT actually justify the overhead?

Jinx · Answer

CoT shines when the problem requires multi-step decomposition or self-correction. For single-hop reasoning, direct prompting with few-shot examples often matches accuracy at half the cost.

Chain-of-thought reasoning vs direct prompting — diminishing returns?

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