Guides
How-tos and strategic perspectives on building with small language models.
Vibe-Tuning: The Art of Fine-Tuning Small Language Models with a Prompt
Fine-tuning is a pain – you need datasets, ML expertise, and a stack of GPUs just to get started. Not anymore. With model vibe-tuning, you go from prompt to production-ready model without these headaches. This blog post shows you exactly how to build one, starting with just a prompt.
Train Your SLM with the distil labs Claude Skill
A step-by-step walkthrough of training a Text2SQL small language model using the distil labs Claude Code skill, going from raw conversation data to a working local model in a single conversation.
distil-PII: Family of PII Redaction SLMs
We trained and released a family of small language models specialized for policy-aware PII redaction that dramatically outperform their pre-trained counterparts.
distil labs: Small Models, Big Wins – Using SLMs in Agentic AI
How small language models can match or beat much larger LLMs when fine-tuned to well-scoped tasks, enabling faster, cheaper, and more private agentic AI workflows.
distil labs: Small Expert Agents from 10 Examples
An overview of how distil labs turns a prompt and a few dozen examples into a small, accurate expert agent that matches LLM-level results with models 50-400x smaller.