Prompt Templates and Few-Shot Prompting

Lesson 4: Prompt Templates and Few-Shot Prompting

Blackboard

Reusable prompts and learning by example

10 min

Concept 1

Prompt templates scale

A prompt template is a reusable prompt with placeholder variables. For example, a skills platform might insert a user's job title, level, and preferred language into the same template, personalising the output for each person without writing a new prompt every time.

Concept 2

Act as X

One of the most popular template patterns is 'act as [role]'. Open-source prompt repositories like the Awesome Prompts collection on GitHub contain thousands of these. They work because assigning a role narrows the model's behaviour to a relevant subset of its knowledge.

Concept 3

Zero-shot vs few-shot

Zero-shot prompting gives the model a task with no examples. Few-shot prompting includes examples of correct input-output pairs. Few-shot is especially powerful when your definitions differ from the general case — like telling the model that 'it is okay but I expected more' counts as negative, not neutral.

Concept 4

Few-shot as a living dataset

Some AI startups treat their few-shot examples like a growing dataset. When a user flags an error, a human labels the correct answer and adds it as a new example in the prompt. This is faster than fine-tuning because you never touch the model's weights — you just update text.

Pause and Think

If you had to classify 10,000 customer reviews using your own definitions of positive and negative, how would you teach the model your rules?

Flashcards

Key Terms

Click or press Enter to flip a card. Review these before the practice question.

Additional Resources

Guide — Few-Shot Prompting
Short reference page with side-by-side examples of zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot. Also covers the known gotchas and how many examples you actually need.
Paper — Few-Shot Prompting
Research paper picking apart when few-shot prompting helps and when it actually makes things worse. The ablation studies add nuance the guides usually skip.
Glossary — Few-shot prompting
A short definition.

Practice Question

You want a model to classify reviews as positive, neutral, or negative using your company's definitions. What is the fastest way to align the model without fine-tuning?

Does not count for certificate

Choose one answer, use the hint if needed, then check your answer.

Use the hint before checking if you need a nudge.

Choose one answer, then click Check Answer.