Zero-Shot, One-Shot, and Few-Shot Prompting

A family of techniques defined by the number of demonstrations included in a prompt. Zero-shot provides an instruction without an example; one-shot adds one demonstration; few-shot uses a small set of demonstrations to indicate a pattern, format, or criterion before the new case.

More examples do not guarantee a better result. Shot selection, order, coverage, and consistency influence behavior and consume context-window capacity. The right count should be chosen through evals that compare a direct instruction with representative examples and test whether the model generalizes beyond the demonstrations.