Published onJuly 19, 2026Can Small LLMs Think Like Cavemen: Compressing Reasoning Traces via SFTmlxsftlocal-aireasoningqwendeepseekAn experiment in fine-tuning small, local language models (Qwen 1.5B) to reason in a telegraphic, compressed style, saving up to 74% of reasoning tokens and speed up inference without relying on verbose prompts.