README.md

metadata

title: Copy Campfire
emoji: ⛺
colorFrom: yellow
colorTo: red
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 5.49.1
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: apache-2.0
short_description: UX writing arena — base model vs fine-tune. You judge.
tags:
  - track:backyard
  - sponsor:modal
  - achievement:welltuned
  - achievement:offbrand
  - achievement:fieldnotes

⛺ Copy Campfire — the UX writing arena

Two UX writers by the fire — one went to training camp. Paste your UI copy, get two blind rewrites (base Qwen3.6-27B vs the ux-writing-1 QLoRA fine-tune), vote, then see the reveal. Votes are stored privately as preference data that trains the next version — the arena is the data flywheel.

The idea

Every product ships copy debt — "Invalid", "OK", "An error occurred while processing your request" — thousands of interface strings nobody owns. ux-writing-1 is a small, open model fine-tuned to review that copy the way a senior UX writer would: rewrite what's weak, keep what's already right, and say why. It runs at codebase scale for cents, on hardware you control — exactly the kind of bulk, structured LLM work that shouldn't be metered at frontier prices.

How it was built

• Base: Qwen3.6-27B — Apache-2.0, 27.8B params (under the 32B limit).
• Training: QLoRA on ~1,400 hand-built before/after pairs, each with a {rewrite, reason, risk} contract and the code context the string lives in. Two runs, ≈$30 of GPU on Modal.
• Serving: Modal OpenAI-compatible endpoint; this Gradio arena calls it live.
• Honest eval: 83% blinded human preference vs the base model (90 held-out items) — not automated heuristics, which saturated.
• At codebase scale: reviewed 10,000 of PostHog's UI strings in 77 min for $3.22 — changed 994, kept 9,006 as-is. Restraint is trained, not hoped for.

Tech

Qwen3.6-27B · QLoRA (PEFT / TRL) · Modal (training + serving) · Gradio (this arena) · llama.cpp / GGUF (zero-cost laptop inference) · Hugging Face Hub (model, adapter, dataset, blinded vote store).

Take it home

• Model: gr33r/ux-writing-1 · adapter · GGUF
• Code & eval tooling: content-designer/ux-writing-1
• Interactive figures: the campfire gallery

Submission

• 🎬 Demo video: Watch the 2-minute demo — also embedded in the 🎬 Watch the demo tab inside the Space.
• 📣 Social post: On LinkedIn

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Space secrets required: BATTLE_URL, AUTH_TOKEN (Modal backend), HF_TOKEN (write access for vote storage); optional VOTES_DATASET.