Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting 2026: Deep Turkish Technical Guide — From Academia to Practice

## 1. What is CoT? Chain-of-Thought prompting — having LLMs write reasoning steps before final answer. Wei et al. 2022 NeurIPS paper. ## 2. Six Variants Zero-shot CoT, Few-shot CoT, Self-Consistency, Tree-of-Thoughts, Graph-of-Thoughts, Auto-CoT. ## 3. Native Reasoning Era GPT-5, Claude Opus 4 extended thinking, o3, Gemini 2.5 Deep Thinking, DeepSeek R1 — all native CoT in 2026. ## 4. When to Use Multi-step math, logic puzzles, multi-hop reasoning, code debugging, planning. ## 5. When NOT to Use Single-fact recall, creative writing, customer-facing simple queries. ## 6. Conclusion CoT revolutionized LLM reasoning. 6 variants for different scenarios. Modern LLMs native CoT but manual techniques still valuable.