Ep 36 | Fine-Tuning vs RAG vs Prompting: A Decision Guide for Engineers

Episode 36 of the series "AI Engineering for Experienced Developers". Three ways to customize an LLM for your use case: prompting, RAG, and fine-tuning. This episode gives you a clear decision tree, real examples, and a cost-and-maintenance comparison so you stop guessing and start choosing the right tool for the job. Part of 'AI Engineering for Experienced Developers', Module 7 - Customising Models, Episode 36. We walk through when each approach wins, when it fails, and how to combine them in production systems. Chapters 0:00 Fine-Tuning vs RAG vs Prompting 0:35 The Three Levers 1:24 Start With Prompting, Always 2:06 When Prompting Hits a Wall 2:47 RAG: Give the Model Fresh Facts 3:27 When RAG Isn't Enough 4:10 Fine-Tuning: Teach the Model Itself 4:49 The Decision Tree 5:34 Cost and Maintenance Reality 6:20 Recap and Next Steps #AIEngineering #RAG #FineTuning #LLM #PromptEngineering