PromptSharp › Glossary › One-Shot Prompting
What is One-Shot Prompting?
One-shot prompting includes exactly one worked example to anchor the model's format and style.
One-shot prompting is few-shot with a single example. It is the cheapest way to communicate an exact output shape when a plain instruction isn't enough but you don't want to spend context on many examples.
It works well for formatting and tone. For harder classification or reasoning consistency, add more examples (few-shot) or reasoning steps (chain-of-thought).
Frequently asked
Is one-shot better than zero-shot?
Often yes for format-sensitive tasks: a single example shows the model exactly what 'done' looks like. For simple tasks the model already handles, one-shot adds little.
Related terms
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