Public works wants a field-supervisor coaching chat grounded in standard operating procedures rather than improvised advice. Which pattern should they implement?

RAG over standard operating procedures for the supervisor coaching chat is the pattern Public Works should implement. Field-supervisor coaching must reflect official SOPs for safety, lockout/tagout, traffic control, confined space, and incident response—not improvised tribal knowledge that varies by crew. Retrieval over the SOP corpus grounds generative coaching in the documents supervisors are accountable to, improving consistency across shifts and reducing invented procedures during stressful field events. Fine-tuning on standard operating procedures for the supervisor coaching chat bakes procedures into static model weights, so it cannot reliably retrieve current SOP sections, cite specific passages, or refuse to answer when no supporting passage exists, which risks outdated or hallucinated coaching during field events. Few-shot prompting with standard operating procedures for the supervisor coaching chat provides only a few static SOP examples in the prompt, so it cannot retrieve across the full SOP corpus, stay current with revisions, or cite specific supporting sections, leaving coaching to imitate examples rather than grounded procedures. Semantic search over standard operating procedures for the supervisor coaching chat only returns relevant SOP passages without feeding them into the chat's generation loop, so supervisors get search hits to interpret themselves rather than SOP-grounded coaching answers with citations. Exam caveat: internal coaching and operations assistants that must follow policy map to retrieval-augmented generation over SOPs and runbooks rather than free-form advice. Operational check: ask coaching questions whose answers differ across SOP versions, verify citations match retrieved SOP sections, and confirm the chat refuses or escalates when no supporting SOP passage is retrieved instead of inventing step-by-step field instructions.