How do you curate and filter a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset, and why does a smaller clean set often win?

A few thousand carefully chosen examples can beat a million scraped ones. The signal is knowing which filters matter, how you measure example quality, and why diversity beats raw volume.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

A few thousand carefully chosen examples can beat a million scraped ones. The signal is knowing which filters matter, how you measure example quality, and why diversity beats raw volume.

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