[jackmpcollins]

With magentic you could do chain-of-thought in two or more steps: one function that generates a string output containing the chain-of-thought reasoning and answer, and a second that takes that output and converts it to the final answer object. I agree though that this is not encouraged or made obvious by the framework.

The approach I'm encouraging with this is to write many functions to achieve your goal. So in the case of your email writing example you might have some of the following prompt-functions - write key bullet points for email about xyz -> list[str] - write email based on bullet points -> str - generate feedback for email to meet criteria abc -> str - update email based on feedback -> str - does email meet all criteria abc -> bool And between these you could have regular python code check things like blacklist/whitelist of keywords, length of paragraphs, and even add hardcoded strings to the feedback based on these checks.

[BoorishBears]

Why would you add a second function for the answer object when you can return an answer object in the same response as the chain of thought?

Overall your second approach makes for really terrible UX and dramatically weakens the performance at the task unless you go and repeat every single definition along the way: ensuring you now have X copies of the prompt spread across the code base and have blown up your token count.

Once you get to that level of granularity between calls, you've pretty much fall back into doing a slower more expensive version of NLP pre-ChatGPT.