In this lesson, "Few-shot Prompting for Extraction", you will deepen your understanding of prompt engineering by focusing on a single idea and applying it with concrete examples. Even though this is a text-only course, you are encouraged to copy the example prompts into your favourite LLM and experiment.
Concept overview
Start by writing down how you would explain this idea to a colleague who has never heard of prompt engineering. Keep it concrete—avoid buzzwords.
Then, compare your explanation with what you see in this lesson and the surrounding lessons. Where do they line up? Where are you still fuzzy?
Apply it with a simple example
Pick a small, low-stakes task (for example, rewriting a short paragraph, summarizing an email, or generating three title ideas). Design a prompt that uses the idea from this lesson. Run it in your LLM, inspect the output, and iterate 2–3 times.
Your goal is not to be perfect. Your goal is to build intuition for how this part of prompt engineering behaves in practice.
Key takeaways
Every lesson in this course is an invitation to experiment. Reading is the first step; turning the idea into a live prompt is what makes it stick.