RAG in Practice — Part 6: RAG, Fine-Tuning, or Long Context?

Part 6 of 8 - RAG Article Series Previous: Build a RAG System in Practice (Part 5) The Question You Should Have Asked Before Building You built a RAG system in Part 5. It loads documents, chunks them, embeds them, retrieves relevant chunks, and generates answers. It works. But was RAG the right tool for that problem? Not every knowledge problem needs retrieval. Some problems need behavior change. Some problems are small enough that you can skip retrieval entirely and just put everything in the prompt. Picking the wrong approach does not just waste effort - it solves the wrong problem well.