Examples in prompts

Garden · not yet reviewed Established: widely used Widely discussed since 2020

Showing the AI one or more samples of what you want, such as a past email or a filled-in table, so it can match the pattern you show it.

Also called: few-shot prompting · show, don't tell · sample outputs · reference examples

Connections

Understand first

Ideas this one builds on.

• Prompting (garden)

Related

Often used together or easily confused.

• AI writing tells (garden)

Blueprints that practise it

• Build a style guide so AI drafts sound like you (garden)

Resources that teach it

• Gemini API prompt design strategies (garden)
• How to Improve Interview Feedback Consistency with a Custom GPT (garden)
• AI Style Guides: How to Help AI Write Like You (garden)

Competency

• Describe the task

Find examples in prompts on the commons map ↗

You may know it from

• teaching worked examples Students learn a method faster from a solved problem than from a description of the method.
• creative services showing a freelancer samples of past work

In plain words

Describing a style is hard. “Friendly but professional” means different things to different people, and to an AI. Showing a sample is much more precise. If you paste in two past emails that landed well and say “write the next one like these”, the AI picks up length, tone, structure and vocabulary all at once.

Examples work for formats too. Give one completed row of a table and ask it to fill the rest the same way. Give one good meeting summary and ask for this week’s in the same shape.

Watch for two problems. The AI may copy your examples too closely, including their specific details, so say what should change. And one example can be over-learned; two or three varied ones show the pattern better than one.

Example

A development director wants donor thank-you notes that sound like her. She pastes three notes she wrote by hand, says “same warmth and length, but use these new donor details”, and the drafts need only light edits.

How it connects

• A simple upgrade to basic prompting.
• The strongest remedy for AI writing tells, because it anchors the AI to real human writing.
• Saved examples are a core ingredient in skills and custom instructions.

Try it

Find one piece of your own writing you’re proud of. Write down two qualities you hope the AI will copy. Paste it as an example with a new task, then check whether it kept those two qualities.

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Read this card as plain Markdown: /concepts/con-examples-in-prompts.md. Know a parallel from your own field, or a product that implements this? Add it.