RAG vs fine-tuning vs prompting, model selection, cost, and evaluation. 10 articles, written by the engineers building AI App Lab.
Open-source AI vs commercial AI 2026: Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek vs GPT, Claude, Gemini. Privacy, cost, fine-tuning, licensing, data residency, vendor lock-in, hybrid strategy, multi-provider architecture, and developer checklist.
LangChain vs LlamaIndex vs raw API 2026: when to use each. LangChain for agents and orchestration, LlamaIndex for RAG and retrieval, raw API for simple calls. Abstraction tax, performance benchmarks, decision tree, and checklist.
LLM cost estimation 2026: token pricing formula, input vs output costs, cache hit rate, batch API 50% off, agent multiplier, self-hosted vs API break-even, RAG cost layers, and production budgeting checklist.
LLM context window 2026: Gemini 2M, GPT-5 400K, Claude 1M, Llama 10M. Lost-in-the-middle, chunking strategies, sliding window, summarization, RAG vs long context, token counting, and production context management checklist.
RAG vs fine-tuning 2026: when to use retrieval augmented generation vs fine-tuning, cost latency accuracy trade-offs, hybrid approach, data volatility, production decision framework, and implementation checklist.
Choose the right LLM 2026: GPT-5, Claude Opus, Gemini Pro, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek compared by cost, latency, accuracy, context window, benchmarks, open source vs commercial, routing strategy, and production checklist.
Build AI feature 2026: idea to production in 7 steps — problem framing, architecture selection, prototype, evaluation, guardrails, deployment, monitoring. LLM, RAG, agent patterns, feature flags, staged rollout, and checklist.
LLM evaluation metrics 2026: faithfulness, answer relevance, context precision, BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, LLM-as-judge, Ragas, DeepEval, human calibration, CI/CD gates, and production evaluation checklist.
Prompt versioning 2026: git-based prompt management, A/B testing, regression testing, promptfoo, LangSmith, prompt registry, CI/CD gates, LLM-as-judge, golden eval set, rollback, and production prompt deployment checklist.
Prompt engineering 2026: zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, system prompts, structured output, JSON mode, temperature, top-p, RAG prompts, prompt injection defense, and production checklist for developers.