When to Fine-Tune, and a Production-Readiness Plan

You will be able to

• Place fine-tuning after prompting and retrieval in the adaptation workflow, with evaluation throughout.
• Name good reasons to fine-tune (format, task-specific behaviour, small specialised models, bias mitigation).
• Classify failures as information-based or behaviour-based and choose RAG or fine-tuning accordingly.
• Weigh the costs of fine-tuning: degraded other tasks, data, expertise, serving and maintenance.
• Estimate fine-tuning memory and explain what parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA save.
• Write a production-readiness plan as a ranked list of gaps with owners and evidence.

Topics

1. 1Fine-tuning comes later
2. 2Good reasons to fine-tune
3. 3Form or facts: fine-tuning or RAG
4. 4Reasons not to
5. 5What fine-tuning takes: memory and LoRA
6. 6Capstone: a production-readiness plan
7. 7Module wrap-up