Phase 1 · Building with LLMs · Prompting
Examples in prompts
Show the model what good looks like (few-shot prompting).
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Why it matters
Some things are easier to show than to describe: a house style, a fiddly output format, the line where one category ends and the next begins. Putting examples in the prompt, called few-shot prompting, is the quickest way to get a model to match what you have in mind. It's the same move as handing a new team member three past emails and saying "like these".
What you'll be able to do
- Explain what examples teach a model, and when they help more than instructions alone
- Choose a small, varied set of examples that covers every label and the tricky cases
- Format examples in tags so the model can't confuse them with the real input
- Build a few-shot prompt from a list of labeled examples in code
Before this lesson
Next in this phase: Structured output