{"slug": "ellf-your-virtual-nlp-engineer-for-agentic-development", "title": "Ellf · Your virtual NLP engineer for agentic development", "summary": "Explosion, the company behind spaCy and Prodigy, launched Ellf, a virtual NLP engineer that plugs into coding assistants such as Claude Code to plan, build and evaluate task-specific NLP systems. Ellf covers project planning, distillation of large language models into smaller private components, model training and analysis, data preparation, annotation guidelines, pattern generation and QA, running on a data-private cluster the customer operates locally or in its own cloud. Explosion says coding assistants fall short on NLP in three ways — annotation, execution and knowledge — and positions Ellf as supplying those missing pieces from 10+ years of industrial NLP work.", "body_md": "**spaCy** and\n\n**Prodigy**\n\n# Your virtual\n\nNLP engineer\n\nYou’ve heard all about vibe coding – now say hello to **vibe NLP**. With Ellf, your team can take back control and build custom and fully private AI solutions in-house.\n\n#### ✳︎Claude Code\n\n`› We need to extract products and features from support tickets. We started with an LLM API but it's slow and expensive, and our data needs to stay private. How can we train our own model?⏺︎Let me analyze your requirements and put together a project plan for you.`\n### Project planning\n\nBreak your business problem down into actionable steps.\n\n### Distillation\n\nUse LLMs to create better, smaller, faster and fully private task-specific components.\n\n### Model training and analysis\n\nTrain and fine-tune task-specific models, analyze the logs and diagnose problems.\n\n### Data preparation and exploration\n\nConvert raw data, cluster information and iterate on label schemes for your task.\n\n### Data development\n\nCollaborate on annotation and automate data labeling with agents\n\n### Annotation guidelines\n\nWrite comprehensive labelling manuals to scale up the data creation process.\n\n### Pattern generation\n\nDetermine what to extract with rule-based logic and create patterns interactively.\n\n### QA and evaluation\n\nTest your system with real-world and synthetic data.\n\n### Coding assistance\n\nBuild custom solutions with spaCy, Prodigy and the powerful Python ecosystem.\n\n`› How can I best solve this?⏺︎Let me analyze your requirements and put together a project plan for you.`\n### Use your favorite tools\n\nEllf integrates seamlessly with your [coding assistant](https://ellf.ai/docs/install#coding-assistants) of choice and makes it proficient at solving NLP problems and executing end-to-end machine learning projects.\n\n## Training experimentSTARTING\n\n## Annotate entitiesSTARTED\n\n### Keep your data private\n\nRun annotation, training and more, powered by a [data-private cluster](https://ellf.ai/docs#architecture) you operate locally or in your own cloud and 100% under your control.\n\n#### ✳︎Claude Code\n\n`› /ellf-support Is this a good approach?⏺︎I've emailed your conversation logs to support@ellf.ai.`\n### Get human support\n\nIf you ever feel stuck or need a second opinion, [send us your logs](https://ellf.ai/docs#support) and have them reviewed by one of our NLP experts – straight from your coding assistant.\n\nFrom the blog\n\n## What coding assistants are missing for NLP\n\nBuilding software is mostly a code problem, but building an NLP system is a **code plus data** problem. Out of the box, coding assistants fall short in three ways – Ellf gives them the missing pieces.\n\n- **Annotation:** A low-friction way to get feedback from humans on real data and “schedule work on a human”.\n- **Execution:** Run long jobs and experiments on a private cluster, without building infrastructure.\n- **Knowledge:** Best practices from 10+ years of solving real-world NLP problems in industry.\n\n[Read the Blog Post](https://explosion.ai/blog/introducing-ellf)\n\n## [Ellf for Prodigy users](https://ellf.ai/prodigy)\n\nAlready using the [Prodigy](https://prodi.gy) annotation tool? Here’s how you can scale up, automate and supercharge your annotation.\n\n## [Ellf for universities](https://ellf.ai/universities)\n\nUse Ellf to collaborate on research and experiments, and speed up and automate development and data collection.\n\n## Optimize every part of your system\n\nInstead of relying on vibes, get a clear picture of what works, build a robust evaluation for every piece of your pipeline, and replace costly LLM calls with smaller, faster and private components.\n\n#### ✳︎Claude Code\n\n`› I want to evaluate our support ticket pipeline. Can you set up a task so our team and an agent can annotate a sample, and compare the routing and extraction steps against the data?⏺︎Sure! Let me set up the annotation task and an evaluation workflow for each component.`\n## Distill large modelSTARTING\n\n## Get started with templates\n\nTemplates package up complete end-to-end workflows so you don’t have to start from scratch. Point your coding agent to a template, adapt it to your use case and data and press play, or export your own projects to share with your team.\n\n#### ✳︎Claude Code\n\n`› /ellf-template Set up this project using the sample data: https://github.com/explosion/ellf-templates/tree/main/llm-to-jev⏺︎I've read the template's README. Let me set up the project, tasks and evaluation workflow.`\n\n## Build custom NLP with Claude Code and agents\n\nHow do you get from an LLM prototype to a fast, cheap and fully private NLP component you can run in production? In this video, Ines shows you how Ellf helps coding agents like Claude Code build a custom NLP model to analyze incoming support tickets.\n\n[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvlUl5c9-zM&list=PLLU8Ghv6hhVA&index=2)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ellf-your-virtual-nlp-engineer-for-agentic-development", "canonical_source": "https://ellf.ai/", "published_at": "2026-11-02 18:51:11+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-02 19:21:44.626070+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["natural-language-processing", "ai-tools", "ai-agents", "developer-tools", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Explosion", "Ellf", "spaCy", "Prodigy", "Claude Code"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ellf-your-virtual-nlp-engineer-for-agentic-development", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ellf-your-virtual-nlp-engineer-for-agentic-development.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ellf-your-virtual-nlp-engineer-for-agentic-development.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ellf-your-virtual-nlp-engineer-for-agentic-development.jsonld"}}