You are misinformed. Chain of thought is essential. It's true it's programmed in, but for good reason. LLMs aren't strong enough to one-shot questions without "

You are misinformed. Chain of thought is essential. It's true it's programmed in, but for good reason. LLMs aren't strong enough to one-shot questions without "chewing on them". You can verify this yourself: ask a simple LLM to multiply two large numbers without a calculator, first without thinking about it ("output a number and nothing else, don't use chain of thought"), then by asking it to do each step of the multiplication "by hand" before telling you the answer.