Prompt Engineering
Beginner

Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Prompting

Learn when plain instructions are enough and when examples are the fastest path to reliable behavior.

25 min
3 sections
zero-shot
few-shot
examples
1
2
3

01. Start zero-shot for simple tasks

Section 1 of 3

Zero-shot prompting means you provide instructions without examples. It works well for common tasks with obvious output patterns: summarization, rewriting, classification with simple labels, and basic code explanations.

text
Classify the following bug report as one of:
UI, API, Database, Authentication, Performance, Unknown.

Rules:
- Output only the label.
- Use Unknown when the report does not contain enough evidence.

Bug report:
Users see 401 after the session refresh endpoint returns success.
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