Learn the frontier · Libraries
Honest, useful guides to the tools you run.
Hands-on tool spotlights. What each one is great at, what it costs you, where it'll surprise you, and whether it's worth switching to over what you already run — the candid guidance you'd want from a teammate who's already lived with it in production.
TRL turns SFT, DPO, and GRPO into Trainer subclasses that inherit the entire Hugging Face stack — accelerate, peft, DeepSpeed. The convenience is real; the cost is that you're debugging someone else's training loop the moment your problem stops looking like the quickstart.
vLLM treats the KV cache like OS virtual memory — non-contiguous paged blocks — and schedules work at the token, not the request. You get high aggregate throughput; the cost is that per-request latency becomes something you tune rather than something you get for free.