building

Definition

Constructing an actual system. A title beginning "Building ..." signals an engineering report rather than a theoretical contribution: the paper describes what was assembled, which design decisions were made, and what broke along the way. The value in this genre usually lies in the operational detail needed to reproduce the result and in the record of approaches that were tried and abandoned, not in a headline benchmark number.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: LLaDA-Image — Building the Visual Prior from Images Alone, Then Distilling to 2–4 StepsLLaDA-Image: Building Strong Image Generators with Fully Open Training Recipes
• Paper Walkthrough: From Production Traffic to Post-Training — Folding 200 Internal Apps Into One Self-Hosted LLMFrom Production Traffic to Post-Training: Building a Self-Hosted LLM That Covers the Corporate Request Mix

In the textbook

• The pn Junction — Building a One-Way Street