Sometimes a single normalization shift or routing trick unlocks stability the marketing slide barely mentions. We visualize before–after losses, note compute budgets, and compare open weights versus gated APIs, so you understand whether replication is feasible next sprint or wishful thinking.
Curated shards, deduping heuristics, and synthetic augmentation increasingly move the needle more than model depth. We spotlight accessible pipelines, annotation pitfalls, and license gotchas, balancing enthusiasm with duty-of-care for privacy, provenance, and downstream harms when datasets wander beyond their intended use.
We celebrate nuanced evals: robust splits, adversarial probes, and temporal drift checks that reveal brittle shortcuts. Expect concrete prompts, confusion matrices, and error taxonomies you can adapt, plus reproducible seeds and scripts that eliminate excuses when reality disagrees with slick leaderboard screenshots.