Should we fine-tune a model, or is prompt engineering enough?

For almost every project, prompt engineering plus retrieval-augmented generation gets you further, faster, and it’s what we build first. Fine-tuning is worth the cost when you have a narrow, well-defined task, a real volume of labeled examples, and you’ve already hit a ceiling with prompting alone — think consistent formatting on a repetitive classification task, not general-purpose chat. We’ve had clients ask for fine-tuning as a first move and talked them out of it because the underlying task didn’t need it yet.