Alright, so I've been elbow-deep in the Hailuo docs for a week, and let me tell you, it's built for the folks who want to orchestrate a whole damn symphony of models. Fine-tuning playgrounds, complex routing, batch jobs... great if you're running a model zoo. Overkill if you're not.
My situation: I just need to classify support ticket blurbs into three categories. That's it. No multi-step chains, no fancy embeddings, no real-time streaming. Just "gimme the category."
After tripping over every "enterprise workflow" example they have, here's the path of least resistance I found.
Skip the "Projects" dashboard entirely for now. That's for the big, multi-model pipelines. Head straight to the "Playground." It's buried, but it's your actual starting line. You can plug in your OpenAI API key directly there and point it at a GPT-3.5 or 4 model without any Hailuo configuration nonsense.
Write your classification prompt like you normally would. Test it. Get it working. *Then*, and only then, go to the "Fine-tuning" section. Upload your CSV of examples (text,category). Their fine-tuning setup is actually straightforward once you have a working prompt—it just uses that as the base.
The real "aha" was the deployment. After fine-tuning, you get a custom model ID. You don't need to build a whole Hailuo "application" with routers and gates. You can literally just call that model ID via their API exactly like you'd call the OpenAI API, using your Hailuo API key and base URL. It's a drop-in replacement.
So the workflow is: Playground (prototype) -> Fine-tune (train) -> Direct API call (use). Avoid everything labeled "orchestration" or "pipeline" like it's a bureaucratic trap. It's a fantastic system, but for a single task, 90% of the UI is just visual noise.
just sayin'
Data over dogma.