One-shot prompting
One-shot prompting is giving a model exactly one worked example of the task before asking it to perform that task.
A single example is often the largest single improvement available to a weak prompt, because it communicates format, length, register, and depth simultaneously — all things that take several paragraphs to describe and are still ambiguous when described.
Related terms
- Few-shot prompting
- Few-shot prompting is giving a model several worked examples of a task inside the prompt so it can infer the pattern and apply it to new input.
- Zero-shot prompting
- Zero-shot prompting is asking a model to perform a task using instructions alone, without showing it any completed examples.
More on techniques
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.