RAG

When a model is not doing what you want, there are three levers people pull: better prompting, retrieval, or fine-tuning. They are wildly different in cost and effort, and teams reach for the expensive one far too early. Here is how to pick the right lever without burning your budget on the wrong one.

RAG, retrieval-augmented generation, is one of those terms that sounds like it needs a PhD and actually describes something you could explain to a ten-year-old. Here is the plain version, why it matters, and the case, more common than the vendors admit, where you do not need it at all.