Article

RAG vs fine-tuning vs prompt engineering

IBM · ibm.com

A neutral, definition-first explainer you can hand to any teammate.

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The question it answers

  1. Prompt engineering, RAG, or fine-tuning: which one does my product actually need?

Read with it

  1. A PM-friendly decision guide with real cost and time estimates for each rung of the ladder. news.aakashg.com Article RAG vs Fine-tuning vs Prompt Engineering: The Complete Guide Aakash Gupta (Product Growth)
  2. The lab's own framing of the successor skill to prompting: keep context informative yet tight. anthropic.com Article Effective context engineering for AI agents Anthropic
  3. The complementary view from the biggest orchestration framework, with concrete patterns. langchain.com Article Context Engineering for Agents LangChain
  4. Runnable code for the context techniques the essays describe. platform.claude.com Guide Context engineering: memory, compaction, and tool clearing (Claude Cookbook) Anthropic
  5. OpenAI's own flywheel: evals feed prompts, prompts feed fine-tuning data, in that order. developers.openai.com Guide Model optimization (OpenAI docs) OpenAI
  6. What fine-tuning is actually for: repeatable patterns and output shapes, not new knowledge. developers.openai.com Guide Fine-tuning best practices (OpenAI docs) OpenAI
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