Fine-Tuning vs RAG vs Prompting: Decision Framework

Teams burn months fine-tuning when retrieval would suffice — or build expensive RAG stacks for use cases where a well-written prompt is enough. Getting the decision right on the first attempt saves 3-12 months of engineering and compute costs. The framework is simple but requires measuring, not guessing: each option has a failure mode that reveals itself only when you run evals.

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