Zero-shot Prompting
Asking Claude to do something without providing any examples — relying on its training to understand what you want from the description alone. "Summarize this article in 3 bullet points" is zero-shot. It works well for straightforward tasks. For more nuanced or domain-specific tasks, adding examples (few-shot) often produces significantly better results.
In practice
You ask Claude to classify a customer email as "complaint," "question," or "compliment" without giving it any examples — just instructions. It does it correctly. That's zero-shot prompting: the model applies its general training to your task without needing demonstrations. It works well for clear, common tasks; for specialized formats, few-shot examples often do better.
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