Few-shot examples for consistent output

What the exam expects

• Recognise few-shot examples as the most effective fix when detailed instructions alone produce inconsistent, unactionable output, and reject restating, capitalising or prefilling as alternatives.
• Write 2-4 targeted examples for ambiguous cases (tool selection, branch-level coverage gaps, resolve-or-escalate) that explain why one action beat a plausible alternative, covering both sides of the line.
• Demonstrate an exact output format (location, issue, severity, suggested fix) and pair acceptable patterns with genuine issues to cut false positives while generalising to new code.
• Use examples to fix extraction from varied document structures and to keep informal values as raw text with null fields instead of invented numbers.
• Make examples diverse, wrap them in <example> / <examples> tags, show intermediate steps in worked examples, and know the rules for tool input_examples.

Key terms: few-shot (multishot) prompting (putting a few input-output examples in the prompt); targeted example (an example chosen for a case Claude gets wrong, not a typical one); contrastive pair (an acceptable pattern and a genuine issue side by side, each with its reason); worked example (problem, method, intermediate results, answer); input_examples (optional tool-definition field of schema-valid example inputs).

Key facts

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