Few-Shot Prompting Examples That Ship (2026)
Five copy-paste few-shot prompting examples that ship: classification, JSON extraction, tone matching, refusal, and format locking, plus the shot-count and label-bias traps.
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Five copy-paste few-shot prompting examples that ship: classification, JSON extraction, tone matching, refusal, and format locking, plus the shot-count and label-bias traps.
ReAct prompting interleaves reasoning and tool calls: Thought, Action, Observation, repeat, until the model has enough to answer. It is how a plain prompt becomes an agent. Six copy-paste ReAct recipes below, each with the failure mode that bites first. Tested July 2026.
Zero-shot prompting is the right default for most tasks in 2026. Five recipes that make instruction-only prompts reliable, plus the exact point to add one example.
A terse, production-first prompt engineering cheat sheet for 2026: fifteen patterns, each with a one-line rule, its failure mode, and a link to the full recipe.
Five paste-ready role prompting recipes for 2026: domain expert, audience, format contract, adversary, and voice, each with its failure mode.
Five paste-ready chain-of-thought prompting examples for 2026, each with its failure mode, plus when reasoning out loud makes the answer worse.
Five paste-ready prompt chaining recipes for 2026: extract-then-reason, draft-critique-rewrite, route, map-reduce, and generate-then-gate, each with its failure mode.
Five paste-ready meta prompting recipes: make the model write, critique, rubric, and template your prompts, each with its failure mode. Plus the honest part: when meta prompting just wastes tokens.