I evaluated 12 models (6 cloud, 6 local) across 5 tasks at shot counts 0, 1, 2, 4, and 8, with 3 trials each. 60 model-task pairs, 27k+ evaluations. Three patterns stood out:

1. Few-shot can cause collapse: Gemini 3 Flash scored 93% at zero-shot on route optimization, then crashed to 30% at 8-shot. Same model family (Gemma 3 27B, local) stayed stable at 90%.

2. Most models benefit from few-shot: On classification, all models scored 0-20% at zero-shot. At 8-shot, scores spread from 27% to 80%. Zero-shot benchmarks would have led to the wrong model choice.

3. Task mismatch ≠ collapse: Reasoning-specialized models scored low on summarization regardless of shot count. They're not "collapsing" — they're just not suited for the task.

A 27B local model (Gemma 3) matched Claude Haiku's adaptation efficiency (AUC 0.814 vs 0.815). The 12-model results are included as default demo data — explore the patterns without API keys.

Article: https://dev.to/shuntarookuma/i-tested-12-llms-with-few-shot-...

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/ShuntaroOkuma/adapt-gauge-core