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Distilled 0.6B text-to-SQL model

Details

External ID
46703884
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Distilled 0.6B text-to-SQL model
Website domain
github.com
Launched
Jan. 21, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
5
Upvotes percentile
0.09617918313570488
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

We used our platform to fine-tune a tiny text-to-SQL model using distillation from DeepSeek V3. Repo has instructions for how to replicate this.This is definitely not the best-performing model like this out there! But I found it surprising we were able to get to this much out of it: stone's throw away from a teacher 1000x the size!We also ran the same thing using the 4B Qwen and matched the teacher accuracy, though here the difference is merely 100x :)I find this pretty cool - obviously our distilled models can only do this one task and don't generalize, but that's often exactly what you want when you're building agentic systems.Happy to answer any questions!

Enrichment

Theme
database infrastructure and developer tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Model & infra
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI-native
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
small text-to-sql language model
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While running a fine-tuning script is accessible, generating high-quality synthetic text-to-SQL distillation datasets from a teacher model and tuning a sub-billion parameter model to retain generalization requires ML engineering expertise.

What it would actually take: The core pipeline consists of PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, and LoRA/QLoRA or full fine-tuning on a small base model (like Qwen2.5-0.5B). The difficult piece is creating and filtering the distillation dataset: schema serialization, prompt synthesis using DeepSeek-V3, and strict execution-based SQL validation to prune hallucinatory queries. Tuning hyperparameters to prevent catastrophic forgetting on tiny models requires empirical ML evaluation and GPU compute resources.

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 115 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #114 of 116 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 84 days after the earliest competitor.

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