Scratchpad
Also called intermediate computation.
A scratchpad is a region of model output reserved for intermediate computation, which the model writes before its final answer so that multi-step calculations can be carried out explicitly.
Description
Nye et al. trained models to emit intermediate steps for tasks like long addition and program execution, an important precursor to chain-of-thought prompting. In practice the term also refers to private reasoning sections that are hidden from end users.
Sources
- Nye et al. (2021). Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models.
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Scratchpad. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0026). https://protologue.com/t/scratchpad/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_scratchpad,
title = {Scratchpad},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0026},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/scratchpad/}
}