PRD — tinygpt quickstart: data → trained specialist in one command

Goal

tinygpt quickstart <data.jsonl> takes a user’s task data and walks them to a trained, evaluated, runnable specialist on their Mac with one command and zero prior knowledge — auto-picks a sensible base from the gallery, infers the recipe, trains, evals against a baseline, and drops them into a chat with the result. The CLI sibling of B6’s GUI Factory tab.

The landscape finding: “fine-tune on your laptop” is owned by a library (MLX-LM), not a product. The conversion barrier is the gap between “MLX-LM can technically do this” and “a person who isn’t an ML engineer actually does it.” B33 is that bridge for the CLI; B6 is it for the GUI.

Why now

• A1 ships the proven recipe; B33 wraps it so a user doesn’t have to read the recipe. The recipe being good and the recipe being reachable are different problems — A1 solves the first, B33 the second.
• Every competitor’s onboarding is “sign up, add a credit card, upload to our cloud.” A brew install → tinygpt quickstart mydata.jsonl flow with no account and no cloud is a categorically different first-run.
• B31 gallery + project pins give quickstart the base-model resolution it needs for free.

Scope — in

• Sources/TinyGPT/Quickstart.swift — the wizard:
  1. Inspect the data — detect format (chat JSONL / instruction / raw text / tool-call traces); report row count + a sample; bail with a clear message if it can’t parse.
  2. Pick a base — heuristic from data shape + size: tool-call data → the A1 base; chat → a small instruct base; raw text → a from-scratch config sized by corpus. Resolved via the B31 gallery. User can override with --base.
  3. Infer the recipe — sequence-packing on, sensible LoRA rank, WSD schedule (B11) once shipped, NEFTune, --eval-every. Print the resolved recipe and ask for confirmation (unless --yes).
  4. Train — call the shipped trainer; show the C10 live view URL.
  5. Eval — run a relevant suite vs the base 0-shot; print the before/after delta (the “did this help?” answer).
  6. Try it — drop into an interactive tinygpt chat against the new specialist, with the base available for A/B.
  • Writes a tinygpt.project.json (B31) so the result is reproducible
    • shippable.
• --dry-run prints the full resolved plan without training.

Scope — out

• GUI — that’s B6 (Factory tab). B33 is the CLI; they share the recipe-resolution logic (factor it into a shared RecipeResolver used by both).
• Multi-stage pipelines (SFT→DPO→quantize chains). V1 = single SFT pass. The recipe resolver can grow stages later.
• Cloud fallback for users without enough RAM. The pitch is local; if the data + base don’t fit, fail with a clear “this needs NGb; try a smaller base” message, not a silent cloud upload.

Files to touch

Don’t touch

• The trainer / eval internals — quickstart orchestrates shipped subcommands.

Acceptance criteria

• tinygpt quickstart sample-toolcalls.jsonl --yes trains an adapter, evals it, and lands in a chat — end to end on M5 Pro, no account, no network beyond an initial base-model pull.
• --dry-run prints the resolved (base, recipe) plan and exits without training.
• Data it can’t parse fails with an actionable message naming the expected formats.
• The run writes a valid tinygpt.project.json (passes B31’s validate()).
• docs/quickstart.md reproduces on a clean brew install.

Reference patterns

• docs/prds/A1-first-specialist-tool-caller.md — the recipe quickstart defaults to.
• docs/prds/B6-mac-app-demo.md — the GUI sibling; share RecipeResolver.
• docs/prds/B31-gallery-and-project-pins.md — base-model resolution + the project file quickstart emits.

Open questions

• How smart the base-picker should be in V1. Recommendation: three buckets (tool-call / chat / raw-text) by data-shape heuristic, with --base override. Don’t build a classifier; the heuristic + override covers the first-run case.
• Whether “try it” requires an interactive REPL or just generates N sample completions side-by-side. Recommendation: sample N side-by-side first (non-interactive, CI-testable); REPL is a nice follow-up.