LoRA vs full fine-tuning, and when does running a 4-bit quantized model on-prem make sense?
Adapter math, the VRAM arithmetic that makes 4-bit a 4x unlock, and the honest decision rule for on-prem deployments. The deep-internals question Mistral and Cohere loops use to find real practitioners.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Adapter math, the VRAM arithmetic that makes 4-bit a 4x unlock, and the honest decision rule for on-prem deployments. The deep-internals question Mistral and Cohere loops use to find real practitioners.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
