schema · evergreen
RAG or fine-tune?
RAG is for knowledge, fine-tuning is for form. A decision table and a decision tree.
The shortest split: RAG is for knowledge, fine-tuning is for form. Baking facts that change weekly into weights means retraining every week.
| RAG | Fine-tune | |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge lives | outside the model | in the weights |
| Updating it | easy — reindex | hard — retrain |
| Inference cost | higher, context is full | lower, prompt is short |
| Context limit | yes, the window | none |
| Citing sources | natural | impossible |
| Good at | facts, fresh data | tone, schema, behaviour |
Rendering diagram…