Skills
Use Chain-of-Symbol prompting to beat Chain-of-Thought on spatial/structured tasks
Chain-of-Symbol (CoS) replaces verbose natural-language reasoning with compact symbols (↑ ↓ [x]) for spatial and structured-planning problems, which both token-optimizes the reasoning buffer and measurably outperforms Chain-of-Thought on spatial reasoning, game states, and layout/planning tasks. The mechanism: natural-language step descriptions add noise and burn tokens where a symbolic state representation is denser and less ambiguous. For builders, this is a cheap swap on any agent doing grid/graph/coordinate reasoning — define a small symbol vocabulary in the system prompt and instruct the model to reason in it.
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