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Dictionary

Zero-Shot Prompting

Asking a model to do a task with no examples in the prompt.

1 min readupdated 2026-07-04

/ quick answer

Zero-shot relies purely on the model's pretraining. Cheap and simple; struggles on formatting-sensitive or domain-specific tasks compared to few-shot. Asking a model to do a task with no examples in the prompt.

Asking a model to do a task with no examples in the prompt. Zero-shot relies purely on the model's pretraining. Cheap and simple; struggles on formatting-sensitive or domain-specific tasks compared to few-shot. In practice: 'Classify this ticket as bug/feature/question.' — no examples given.
Definition
Zero-shot relies purely on the model's pretraining. Cheap and simple; struggles on formatting-sensitive or domain-specific tasks compared to few-shot.
Example
'Classify this ticket as bug/feature/question.' — no examples given.

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What is Zero-Shot Prompting?

Zero-shot relies purely on the model's pretraining. Cheap and simple; struggles on formatting-sensitive or domain-specific tasks compared to few-shot.

What is an example of Zero-Shot Prompting?

'Classify this ticket as bug/feature/question.' — no examples given.

Why does Zero-Shot Prompting matter?

Asking a model to do a task with no examples in the prompt.

What should I learn after Zero-Shot Prompting?

Open the related workflows and prompts further down this page: they show how this idea is applied in a real task, step by step.

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Related concepts

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