Engineering noteProposed topic — outline, not published findings
Fine-Tuning vs. RAG: Choosing How a Model Learns Your World
Two ways to make a model know your domain — and why the answer is often both.
Different jobs
Retrieval gives a model access to changing facts with citations. Fine-tuning changes how a model behaves — style, format, and domain reasoning patterns.
Decision factors
How fast does the knowledge change? Do you need citations? Is the failure mode wrong facts or wrong behaviour? Retrieval answers the first two; tuning addresses the third.
The hybrid default
In practice: retrieval for facts, tuning for behaviour, and an evaluation set that can tell you when either is drifting.
