Home/ Part XIII — Expert Mode: Systems, Agents, and Automation/39. Prompt Engineering for Experts (The Real Stuff)/39.4 Multi-step reasoning with enforced intermediate artifacts

39.4 Multi-step reasoning with enforced intermediate artifacts

Overview and links for this section of the guide.

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Thinking Tags

Force the model to show its work using XML tags.

You must output in this format:

Analyze the user request.
List the files involved.
Plan the change.


...

Why It Works

The model generates tokens sequentially. By forcing it to generate the `` block first, those tokens become part of the context for the ``. The model effectively "talks itself into the right answer."

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