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Fine-tuning an LLM vs RAG vs prompting

ai-architecture

When to fine-tune, when to use RAG, and when to just prompt better.

⏳ Consider

Confidence: 0.82

Decision Reason

Prompting and RAG first; fine-tuning only when you have a stable, evaluable task that the other two can't solve.

Best For

Teams that want a heuristic they can apply to most LLM work

Teams with mature ML infrastructure who already know this

Tasks where training data changes weekly (use RAG)

Version: 1.0.0

Created: 6/14/2026

Status: pending