In Production: Choosing Your Lever

The domain’s production capstone: prompt, retrieval, or weights — the decision framework, the cost shapes, and why real systems compose all three.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. The Decision Framework
2. The Cost Shapes
3. The Composite Answer

Sources

• Brown et al. (2020) — Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (in-context learning)
• Lewis et al. (2020) — Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
• Hu et al. (2021) — LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
• Dettmers et al. (2023) — QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs