Prompting·intermediate
Few-shot prompting
Show examples instead of explaining. The AI continues the pattern.
When a task is easier to demonstrate than to explain, give examples:
Classify these movie reviews.
"Loved every minute" → positive "Waste of two hours" → negative "The soundtrack saved it" → mixed
"I wanted to like it but the pacing killed it" →
The model sees the pattern in your examples and continues it. Two to five examples usually beats a paragraph of instructions. That's few-shot prompting — you're giving the model a few shots at seeing what you mean.
Zero-shot is the opposite. No examples, just the instruction. Few-shot is almost always stronger when the task involves a specific format, style, or judgment call.