📊 You don't need to fine-tune your LLM. You probably don't need RAG either.

Here's the test: Can you describe what you want in clear instructions? Start there. Prompt engineering solves 80% of use cases.

Need the model to reference your docs? That's RAG. You're solving a retrieval problem, not a training problem.

Fine-tuning is for when you need consistent specialized behavior at scale and simpler approaches have failed. It's your last option, not your first.

Most expensive LLM mistakes happen because teams skip this decision stage and jump straight to what sounds sophisticated.