protologue

Chain of Draft

Also called CoD, concise chain-of-thought.

Chain of Draft is a variant of chain-of-thought prompting in which the model writes only a minimal draft of each reasoning step, a few words rather than full sentences, to reach an answer with far fewer tokens.

Description

The authors report accuracy comparable to standard chain-of-thought on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks while using a small fraction of the output tokens, which lowers cost and latency. It is most useful where reasoning helps but verbose explanations are not needed.

Example

Think step by step, but keep only a minimum draft for each step, five words at most. Give the answer after ####.

Sources

  1. Xu et al. (2025). Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less.

Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Chain of Draft. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0116). https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-draft/

BibTeX
@misc{protologue_chain_of_draft,
  title = {Chain of Draft},
  author = {{Protologue}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.4.0},
  note = {Entry PTL-0116},
  url = {https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-draft/}
}

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