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CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

What this is

ShadowLM Trainer is a fine-tuning SDK: load any open model, train it with any of 13 methods, on any hardware, then own the weights. The headline use case is "shadowing" — moving one task off a rented frontier model onto a small model you own, by capturing real agent traffic (slm.capture()), judging episodes, and training on them — without modifying the agent (the model API is the only boundary). The repo is the engine; the orchestration tier is ShadowLM Studio.

The whole product reads like the task in shadowlm/models.py: slm.load(...) → model.finetune(ds, method=...) → model.generate(...) → model.save(...). Keep that surface tiny — the machinery lives in the backends.

Commands

make install           # editable install with CLI + mlx backend (Apple Silicon dev loop)
make install-torch     # editable install for CUDA / CPU boxes
make frontend          # npm install + build the React studio into shadowlm/_static
make serve             # studio UI + API on one port (PORT=8329)
make dev               # serve with Vite hot-reload UI alongside the backend
make demo              # end-to-end smoke: a tiny CLI finetune (mlx, 0.5B, ~seconds)
make check             # compileall the package + `tsc -b` the frontend
make build             # build the frontend, then the wheel+sdist, then twine check
make release           # bump patch (or BUMP=minor/major, V=x.y.z), build, tag, push

pytest                                       # the CPU test suite (tests/, excludes gpu/)
pytest tests/test_more_plus_router.py        # a single test file
pytest tests/test_more_plus_router.py::test_name -x   # a single test, stop on first fail
make gpu-test          # the CUDA verification suite — run on a GPU box only

tests/gpu/ (CUDA, real GPU) is not part of the default pytest run — it's invoked explicitly via make gpu-test or python tests/gpu/test_cuda.py.

Releases publish to PyPI via .github/workflows/publish.yml on a v* tag. The CI gate requires the version to match in three places: the git tag, pyproject.toml, and shadowlm/__init__.py. make bump/make release keep the latter two in sync — never edit only one.

Architecture

Two orthogonal registries — backends (where training runs) × methods (what training does) — meet in the SDK surface. Adding a backend or a method touches one file and no others.

The two axes

  • shadowlm/backends/ — a Backend (see backends/base.py) holds a loaded model and knows how to load / finetune / generate / chat / save. Implementations: mlx.py (Apple-Silicon dev loop), torch.py (the production CUDA/CPU path, on HF Trainer + accelerate + trl + peft), remote.py (speaks the JSON protocol to a server), verl.py (multi-GPU GRPO). Selection lives in backends/__init__.py::select_backend — auto = CUDA→torch, else Apple→mlx, else torch-on-CPU. Everything user-facing is backend-agnostic; mlx and torch must stay swappable without changing the SDK.

  • shadowlm/methods/ — each method is a declarative TrainingMethod spec (methods/base.py): an adapter kind (ADAPTER_LORA, ADAPTER_MORE, …), a base-model requirement (quantized_base: True=needs 4-bit, False=needs unquantized, None=either), a trainer ("sft"/"dpo"/"grpo"), and a default LR. Backends dispatch on the spec's fields, never on the method name — that invariant is what makes method="lora" → "qlora" a one-word change. Registering a method is a new module with one register(...) call, imported in methods/__init__.py; users can methods.register(...) at runtime too.

The SDK surface (models.py, training.py, data.py)

  • models.py — load() returns a Model; Model.finetune/generate/chat/save. This is the whole library in one object; resist growing it. Tool-call parsing for chat() (small models emit slightly mangled tool JSON) lives here too.
  • training.py — TrainConfig (every hyperparameter, with which backend honors it noted inline), Metric, and TrainingRun (the live+final handle: metrics history, sparkline/plot, checkpoints, persistence). TrainConfig is the single source of truth — the CLI's --set/--config validates against the dataclass so it can't drift from the SDK.
  • data.py — Dataset is rows + a detected format (chat / sharegpt / preference / instruction / text / raw). Backends turn a formatted dataset into training text. Local loading is pure-stdlib; from_hf lazy-imports datasets.

The shadowing / agent-tuning loop

  • capture.py — slm.capture(model) is a drop-in OpenAI-compatible proxy that records an unmodified agent's traffic, reconstructing message-level trajectories (calls that extend a prior call's message prefix merge into one episode; use an x-session-id header to disambiguate interleaved conversations).
  • rl.py — Trajectory / TrajectoryGroup / judge_group (LLM-judge scoring), fed into method="grpo".
  • apo.py — optimize_prompt(): optimize the prompt instead of weights, same capture/judge front end, no GPU.

Signature methods (MoRE)

more.py / more_plus.py implement "mixture of retrieval experts" — facts fused into attention for near-zero-hallucination recall (faiss + sentence-transformers). more_plus trains one final-FFN LoRA expert per knowledge unit with BM25+semantic routing; its run progress is one step per unit (see resolve_total_steps).

Server, remote protocol, and the studio

  • serve.py — python -m shadowlm.serve / shadowlm serve. Pure-stdlib (http.server + threads) reference server: trains on this machine's real backend (no mock), streams metrics, ships adapters as tar.gz, serves the built React UI from _static. One job at a time — honest reference tier.
  • remote.py — the typed client for that JSON protocol (/v1/finetunes, …). Same protocol backs backend="remote" and ShadowLM Studio.
  • frontend/ — React 19 + Vite + Tailwind v4 studio. npm run build outputs to ../shadowlm/_static (the wheel ships the compiled UI; end users never need node). frontend/src/api.ts is the typed mirror of the remote protocol. The pages (Datasets → Models → Train → Runs → Playground) are the capture→train→own loop as a UI. Auth: studio routes are gated by username/password.

The shadow accelerator (accel.py)

accelerator="shadow" turns on optimizations that are safe for the current model+hardware — gradient checkpointing, flash-attn-2, fused 8-bit optimizer, 4-bit QLoRA, optional Liger kernels. It logs exactly what it enabled and no-ops when something is unavailable — there are no silent magic multipliers and no custom GPU kernels. Keep that property when touching it.

Conventions

  • Batteries included: pip install shadowlm pulls the full torch/HF training stack + retrieval + CLI. mlx is auto-added on arm64 macOS via a wheel marker. Only [kernels] (Liger) and [verl] stay opt-in. The [torch]/[mlx]/[cli] etc. extras are back-compat aliases that resolve to nothing — don't add deps to them.
  • Method/base mismatches raise actionable errors (e.g. qlora on a 16-bit base tells you to load a 4-bit one). Follow that pattern.
  • TrainConfig fields a backend can't honor are ignored with a log line, never silently dropped.
  • Default artifacts land in ~/.shadowlm/ (runs, server work dir, the install venv).