Zero-shot vs few-shot prompting

Lesson 4 of 8 · 25 min · part of the AI Prompt Engineer certification

Zero-shot prompting means asking the model to perform a task with instructions only — no examples. Modern models are very good at it for common tasks.

Few-shot prompting includes a small number of worked input → output examples in the prompt. Examples are the fastest way to communicate a format, a label set, or a style that is hard to describe in words.

Interactive exercise: Support-ticket classifier

Notice what happened with 1-shot: the model saw only a billing example and became biased toward "billing". Good few-shot sets are balanced across labels, diverse in phrasing, and consistent in format. Put tricky edge cases in your examples, not just easy ones.