Few-Shot Prompting

Few-shot prompting is a technique where you include a small number of examples (typically 2-5) in your prompt to show the AI exactly what kind of output you expect. Instead of just describing what you want, you demonstrate it. This is one of the most effective prompt engineering techniques because AI models are extremely good at pattern recognition — when you show them examples, they can replicate the pattern with remarkable accuracy.

The term comes from machine learning, where "few-shot learning" means learning from just a few examples. Zero-shot means no examples (just instructions), one-shot means one example, and few-shot means several examples.