PyTorch Template — The Human Skill Guide

Your AI agent reads .claude/skills/pytorch-train/SKILL.md to know how to run experiments. These docs are the human equivalent — they teach you the same pipeline, with the why that machines don’t need.

Two Skills, One Pipeline

	AI Agent Skill	Human Skill (these docs)
Location	.claude/skills/pytorch-train/	docs/
Reads	Config rules, param ranges, CLI commands	Workflow intuition, design decisions, trade-offs
Learns	What to do	Why to do it
Format	Imperative instructions	Tutorial with examples

The Pipeline

Both skills follow the same 7-phase pipeline:

Phase 1: Config Creation      → Chapter 2
Phase 2: Pre-flight Check     → Chapter 1
Phase 3: Training              → Chapter 1, 3
Phase 4: HPO with Optuna      → Chapter 4
Phase 5: HPO Analysis          → Chapter 4
Phase 6: Final Training        → Chapter 1
Phase 7: Analysis              → Chapter 1

Chapters

1. The Full Pipeline — End-to-end walkthrough from config to analysis
2. Configuration Deep Dive — RunConfig, OptimizeConfig, data loading, validation tiers
3. Callback System — 9 built-in callbacks, priority ordering, writing your own
4. Hyperparameter Optimization — Search spaces, PFL pruner, hpo-report, extracting best params
5. Customization Guide — Custom models, data loaders, loss functions, metrics

Quick Reference

python -m cli doctor              # Check environment
python -m cli preflight <config>  # Pre-flight check (1 batch forward+backward)
python -m cli preview <config>    # Show model architecture
python -m cli train <config>      # Train
python -m cli hpo-report          # Analyze HPO results
python -m cli analyze             # Analyze trained model