Zero-shot prompting is the baseline: describe what you want in plain text and see what you get. Modern frontier models are surprisingly capable zero-shot because RLHF trained them to follow varied instructions across many domains.
Zero-shot is fast to develop, cheap, and often good enough. Start here before investing in few-shot or fine-tuning. When it fails — inconsistent format, wrong style, misunderstood task — that's the signal to add examples (few-shot) or tighten the schema (structured output). Never skip zero-shot; you'll often be surprised.
The other version: "zero-shot chain-of-thought" — adding "Let's think step by step" to a zero-shot prompt to coax reasoning without examples. It outperforms plain zero-shot on most reasoning-heavy tasks at no extra setup cost.
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