TUI as corpus producer
The TUI-as-Corpus-Producer pattern is the design intent that operator terminal interaction with the Doorman becomes a primary source of high-quality training data for the per-tenant model adapter. There is no single slm-cli terminal component — the console app that monitors the Doorman today (app-console-slm) is a health and entity-count dashboard with no chat or verdict-capture surface of its own. The real verdict-capture path that exists today, POST /v1/verdict, is called by the proofreader console, not a general-purpose SLM chat interface. The pattern this article describes — any terminal interaction feeding a training corpus through a signed verdict — is the platform's intended direction, not a currently-shipped generalized TUI.
Why terminal interactions are high-quality training data
Three properties distinguish system administration and IT-support interactions from general training data:
Verifiable ground truth. When an operator follows AI advice — running a suggested command, applying a proposed configuration change — the system either recovers or it does not. Other domains such as creative writing or strategic reasoning lack this immediate-feedback property. IT-support has it by default. The operator knows immediately whether the response was correct.
Narrow domain. Archive operations, system conventions, and customer-specific workflow vocabulary form a bounded command set and failure-mode space. Models train more efficiently on bounded domains than on general corpora because the signal-to-noise ratio is higher.
Domain-expert feedback. The operator issuing a verdict is the person who knows whether the response was correct — not a proxy labeler separated from the actual work. Published reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback literature consistently reports that high-quality verdict-signed interaction tuples train an order of magnitude more efficiently than observation-only tuples. 1
The verdict mechanism
The verdict endpoint that exists today (POST /v1/verdict) is binary: accept the response, or reject it and keep the alternative. There is no third "refine inline" disposition in the shipped mechanism, despite that being a natural design extension. A binary accept/reject verdict is enough to produce a direct preference optimisation training pair — the accepted and rejected responses to the same prompt — without needing a graded scale.
If an interaction produces no verdict at all, the interaction is not currently captured as a training tuple at all — there is no unsigned-but-still-useful capture path confirmed to exist for supervised fine-tuning today.
Adapter quality budget
Published fine-tuning literature suggests 200 to 500 high-quality verdict-signed interactions are sufficient for a first adapter training cycle in a narrow domain. 2 The platform's intended sequence for each tenant is: accumulate signed interactions from dogfood operations, train the first per-tenant adapter via the LoRA training pipeline, apply a validation quality gate, and promote the adapter to the deployment. Each subsequent training cycle incorporates additional interactions, progressively tuning the adapter to the customer's specific environment — their systemd units, their seed taxonomy, their workflow vocabulary.
Per-tenant adapter ownership
The corpus produced by a customer's operators trains that customer's adapter, not a general adapter. Per the Customer-owned graph IP convention, the trained adapter weights are the customer's property. The platform distributes the model architecture and the training pipeline; the customer retains the trained adapter that results.
Verdict capture discipline
Some terminal sessions should not contribute to the training corpus: test sessions initiated with a no-corpus flag, sessions interrupted by unavailable tiers before completion, and sessions using forced-tier debug mode are audit-logged but excluded from normal training data. The boundary between operational corpus and test corpus is enforced at the Doorman's verdict intake endpoint.
See also
- Single-boundary compute discipline — the TUI never calls inference tiers directly; all calls route through the Doorman
- Customer-owned graph IP — per-tenant adapter weights are the customer's intellectual property
- Knowledge-graph-grounded apprenticeship — training tuples carry graph context when the Doorman grounds the request
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Rafailov, R. et al. 'Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model.' NeurIPS, 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290 ↩
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Zhou, C. et al. 'LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment.' NeurIPS, 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11206 ↩