Thought Based Reasoning

This is a comprehensive reference guide for getting Claude to show its work on complex problems. It covers eight reasoning techniques with actual prompt templates, decision matrices showing accuracy gains, and implementation examples. The core idea: adding "Let's think step by step" can boost accuracy 20-60% on reasoning tasks, and the guide walks through when to use zero-shot CoT versus few-shot versus heavier approaches like Tree of Thoughts for problems requiring backtracking. Each technique includes research citations, strengths, limitations, and concrete code snippets. Most useful when you're hitting a wall with simple prompts on math, logic, or multi-step problems and need a systematic approach backed by actual research numbers.