# Plan-and-Solve Prompting

> Plan-and-solve prompting is a zero-shot method that instructs the model to first devise a plan dividing the task into subtasks and then carry out the plan step by step.

- Identifier: PTL-0031
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/plan-and-solve-prompting/
- Also known as: PS prompting, PS+
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

It targets missing-step and calculation errors seen in zero-shot chain-of-thought, with an extended version that asks the model to extract relevant variables and compute carefully.

## Broader terms

- [Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought](https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/)

## Related terms

- [Least-to-Most Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/least-to-most-prompting/)

## Sources

- Wang et al. (2023). Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04091

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Plan-and-Solve Prompting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0031). https://protologue.com/t/plan-and-solve-prompting/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)