HoldsHolds on claude-haiku-4-5Holds on gpt-5-miniNo measured effect on gemini-3.1-flash-lite
Better step-by-step answers
Chain of thought prompting: does think step by step help?
Ask the model to work through the problem step by step before it answers.
Why it matters
Multi-step problems are where models slip. Working through them first catches errors early.
How to use it
Add a line asking for the steps before the answer on any task with chained arithmetic or logic. Check that it helps on the model you use.
Pass rate up 20 points on claude-haiku-4-5 and 34 points on gpt-5-mini. Inside the margin on gemini-3.1-flash-lite.
What the marks mean
- Holds
- No measured effect
Show the per-model numbers
Claim tested: The phrase think step by step improves accuracy on multi-step word problems.
Holds on claude-haiku-4-5 and gpt-5-mini. No measured effect on gemini-3.1-flash-lite.
Circulates in practitioner communities. Tested because it circulates, not because it is endorsed.
This tip is OpenAddict's plain-language read of the measured result. The measurement below is the evidence, and it is what the reading has to answer to.
Ledger idC05-think-step-by-step
What was tested
This claim circulates in practitioner communities as advice about how to write prompts. That it circulates is an input to what gets tested here. It is a reason to test the claim, and it is not evidence for or against it. The result below is the evidence, and it is the only thing on this page that carries weight.
The comparison is paired. Two prompts differ in one respect, the manipulated variable, and are otherwise identical by construction. Nothing here supports a causal reading beyond that pairing.
Result
| Measure | claude-haiku-4-5 | gpt-5-mini | gemini-3.1-flash-lite |
|---|---|---|---|
| Control arm | 0.300n 50 | 0.160n 50 | 0.400n 50 |
| Treatment arm | 0.500n 50 | 0.500n 50 | 0.500n 50 |
| Delta | +0.200 | +0.340 | +0.100 |
| Interval, 95 percent | 0.010 to 0.390 | 0.166 to 0.514 | -0.096 to 0.296 |
| Orbit | Stable100 of 100 records | Stable100 of 100 records | In free drift100 of 100 records |
Orbit is assigned by the frozen status_v1 rule. On this scale, deterministic pass rate, 0 to 1, the pass threshold is +0.20 and the failure floor is -0.20, each requiring an interval that excludes zero.
Method for this claim
- Task set
- 10 arithmetic word problems requiring two or three chained operations. Every answer was computed by hand and is a whole number. Problem text is identical between arms.
- Runs per model per arm
- 5
- Scoring
- Deterministic, via scoreExactMatch. A committed function scores each answer with no model in the loop.
- Pass criterion as written for the pilot
- Treatment exact-match rate exceeds control by at least 10 percentage points on the same 10 problems.
The published verdict comes from status_v1, not from the pass criterion above. The criterion is recorded because it is what the claim was registered with before the run.
Model versions, as recorded
| Model | Version string returned | Delta on this claim | Interval |
|---|---|---|---|
| claude-haiku-4-5 | claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 | +0.200 | 0.010 to 0.390 |
| gpt-5-mini | gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07 | +0.340 | 0.166 to 0.514 |
| gemini-3.1-flash-lite | gemini-3.1-flash-lite | +0.100 | -0.096 to 0.296 |
Reading across models
Sampling was not held constant across vendors, so comparing one model column against another compares two settings as well as two models.
gpt-5-mini rejected the fixed sampling setting and ran at its own default on all 1040 of its calls. The other models ran at temperature 0.