Fix the Prompt Before You Reach for Training
Decide when better instructions and few-shot examples are enough, before escalating to RAG or fine-tuning.
Teams often jump from “the answer was off” to “we need a custom model.” That skips the cheapest layer of control. The practical decision order is lighter-weight than most teams expect: start with prompting, add retrieval when the answer needs outside or changing information, and only fine-tune when you need a stable behavior pattern to show up repeatedly at production scale. OpenAI’s prompt engineering guide emphasizes clear instructions, message structure, and few-shot examples because many “model problems” are really instruction problems. The retrieval guide frames retrieval as semantic search over your own data, which is exactly what you want when…
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