We Got Claude to Fine-Tune an Open Source LLM

Back to Articles We Got Claude to Fine-Tune an Open Source LLM Published December 4, 2025 Update on GitHub Upvote 592 +586 ben burtenshaw burtenshaw Follow shaun smith evalstate Follow We gave Claude the ability to fine-tune language models using a new tool called Hugging Face Skills. Not just write training scripts, but to actually submit jobs to cloud GPUs, monitor progress, and push finished models to the Hugging Face Hub. This tutorial shows you how it works and how to use it yourself. Claude Code can use "skills"—packaged instructions, scripts, and domain knowledge—to accomplish specialized tasks. The hf-llm-trainer skill teaches Claude everything it needs to know about training: which GPU to pick for your model size, how to configure Hub authentication, when to use LoRA versus full fine-tuning, and how to handle the dozens of other decisions that go into a successful training run. With this skill, you can tell Claude things like: Fine-tune Qwen3-0.6B on the dataset open-r1/codeforces-cots And Claude will: Validate your dataset format Select appropriate hardware (t4-small for a 0.6B model) Use and update a training script with Trackio monitoring Submit the job to Hugging Face Jobs Report the job ID and estimated cost Check on progress when you ask Help you debug if something goes wrong The model trains on Hugging Face GPUs while you do other things. When it's done, your fine-tuned model appears on the Hub, ready to use. This isn't a toy demo. The skill supports the sa...