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Decide between chain-of-thought and direct-answer prompting for a specific task
Help me decide whether to use explicit chain-of-thought prompting or a direct-answer prompt for this task: task_description, rather than defaulting to 'CoT is always better'. Given the task and 2-3 example inputs:
1. Characterize the task type: is it primarily a multi-step reasoning task (where CoT genuinely helps by giving the model room to work through steps) or a retrieval/classification/formatting task (where CoT often just adds latency/cost without improving accuracy, or can even hurt by giving the model room to talk itself into an over-thought wrong answer).
2. If CoT seems warranted, specify what kind: should reasoning be shown to the user (useful for auditability) or hidden/scratchpad-only (useful when you only want the final answer and reasoning would clutter the response)?
3. If direct-answer seems sufficient, say so plainly and don't hedge into recommending CoT 'just in case', that defeats the point of the comparison.
4. Propose a quick test: 3 inputs where CoT and direct-answer would most likely diverge if there's a real difference, so I can verify the recommendation empirically rather than trusting the theoretical argument alone.
Task: task_description
Example inputs: example_inputs