Zero-shot prompting
Also known as: zero-shot
Zero-shot prompting is asking a model to perform a task with no examples in the prompt — just the instruction. It has to draw entirely on what it learned in pretraining.
- “Translate this to French.” (no examples) → zero-shot.
- “Translate this to French:” + 3 examples → few-shot.
It’s the simplest form, and modern models handle a lot zero-shot.
When it's enough: for common, well-learned tasks, zero-shot works. When output quality or format slips, adding 2–3 examples (few-shot) is the cheapest fix.