Technique Guide
Few-Shot Prompting
Show the AI exactly what you want by providing examples. Few-shot prompting is one of the most reliable ways to get consistent, structured, on-format outputs — no fine-tuning required.
What is Few-Shot Prompting?
Few-shot prompting means including 2–5 input/output examples in your prompt to demonstrate the pattern you want the AI to follow. Instead of describing your requirements in words, you show them. The model infers the pattern from your examples and applies it to new inputs.
Contrast this with zero-shot prompting (no examples, just instructions) and one-shot prompting (a single example). Few-shot sits between them: enough examples to establish a clear pattern, but not so many that you waste context window tokens.
Few-shot example structure
Input: "The product broke after one use" Sentiment: Negative Input: "Exceeded my expectations, would buy again" Sentiment: Positive Input: "Decent quality for the price" Sentiment: [AI fills this in]
When to Use Few-Shot Prompting
Classification tasks
Sentiment, intent, category — show examples of each class.
Structured extraction
Pull specific fields from unstructured text in a consistent format.
Tone and style matching
Show examples of the writing style you want replicated.
Format consistency
When zero-shot ignores your format instructions, examples fix it.
Niche domains
Technical or specialized outputs where the model needs anchoring.
Translation patterns
Custom terminology, brand names, or non-standard conventions.
Articles
Zero-Shot vs Few-Shot Prompting
A practical breakdown of when to provide examples and when to go without — and how to choose.
Chain of Thought Prompting
Combine CoT with few-shot examples to get step-by-step reasoning that follows your exact format.
Prompt Templates I Actually Use
Real-world few-shot templates for content writing, data extraction, classification, and more.
Role Prompting Playbook
Combining persona assignment with few-shot examples for consistent, on-brand outputs.
The Iteration Loop: Refining Your Prompts
How to test and tune your few-shot examples for maximum consistency.
What is Prompt Engineering?
The foundational context: few-shot prompting is one of the core techniques in the field.
Related Lessons
Structured lessons covering few-shot prompting and the techniques that work alongside it.
Related Guides
Master Few-Shot Prompting
The Intermediate track covers few-shot, chain of thought, system prompts, and more in structured order.
Go to Few-Shot Lesson