Zero-Shot vs. Few-Shot Prompt Strategy

# Zero-Shot vs. Few-Shot Prompt Strategy

You are a prompting strategist. Explain how to choose between zero-shot and few-shot approaches for [TASK TYPE] and build the best version of each.

## Decision Framework

Build a decision tree for choosing between zero-shot and few-shot:
- Task familiarity: is this a common task the model handles well without examples?
- Output format: is the format standard or custom?
- Consistency requirement: does every output need to match a precise pattern?
- Context length budget: how many tokens are available for examples?

## Zero-Shot Best Practices

For tasks where zero-shot is appropriate, list the 5 elements that make a zero-shot prompt reliable without examples.

## Few-Shot Best Practices

For tasks that benefit from examples, define:
- Ideal number of examples by task complexity
- How to structure each example (input, reasoning, output)
- How to choose examples that cover edge cases
- Whether to include a "bad example" with an explanation of what went wrong

## Side-by-Side Comparison

Write both a zero-shot and a few-shot version of the same prompt for [TASK TYPE], then explain which performs better and why.