Toolshed · the libraries desk
Honest verdicts on the tools you run.
Tool spotlights with honest verdicts. What it is for, what it costs you, where it breaks, and whether to adopt it over what you already run.
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.