Zero-shot prompting gives instructions without examples. Few-shot prompting adds a small set of input and output examples that demonstrate the expected behavior.
Start zero-shot when the task is familiar and the rules are easy to state. It keeps the prompt shorter and avoids examples that might bias the answer. Use few-shot prompting when the format is unusual, labels are domain-specific, edge cases matter, or instructions alone produce inconsistent results.
Choose examples that cover meaningful variations, not several copies of the easy case. Keep their formatting consistent with the real input. Compare both approaches on an evaluation set because examples consume context and can sometimes make a capable model copy irrelevant details.
Rewriting in plainer words…
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