Can one engineer do the pilot?
One engineer can implement a narrow experiment, but cannot replace product acceptance, domain review and accountable data approval. The broader evaluation workflow in Anthropic’s guide illustrates why a training script alone is insufficient.
Should we begin with full fine-tuning?
Not automatically: compare the simplest credible adaptation route with the base model, then escalate only if the evidence warrants it. PEFT documents a lower-memory route, while published comparisons show that efficiency can involve performance trade-offs.
How do we budget a pilot without a vendor quote?
Estimate person-days, review hours, metered compute and integration separately, then set a spend cap and stop gate. Use dated published prices only for the matching service unit; they do not price the whole engagement.
When can we use the final holdout?
Use it after configuration and acceptance criteria are frozen for the decision. Group separation is one part of the protection; repeated tuning against its answers turns it into development data.
What should we do if the fine-tune loses?
Record the failure and keep the better viable baseline, or diagnose a specific data or architecture problem before another bounded experiment. The purpose of error analysis is to direct work towards the actual bottleneck, not justify training already commissioned.