I'm exhausted.
A couple years ago, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.
Around this time, Dall-E came out and I was instantly hooked. It made no sense but I knew this was what I needed to pursue - whatever this was.
And that's what I've done for the past 3 years. 3 years of manically moving from one level of obsession to another.
I had spent enough of my life doing bullshit things for bullshit reasons and wanted to really do this. To understand it at every level.
As I started to do this - create art, build stuff, etc. - a goal slowly began to materialise: to create tools that felt like how it feels to paint with intention, tools powered by AI that capture something of the process that's behind all the art we love.
This lead me to deeper places, towards understanding how the models work, towards Comfy, towards building the Banodoco community.
Lately, I was reflecting on Dough, a tool that I made last year.
Together with help from Piyush, I spent the better part of more than 6 months building it.
I'm not one of those geniuses who can just pick up a new skill overnight. I'm at least half idiot. This six months was a brutal struggle.
My direction with Dough was correct - the Animatediff ecosystem had so many amazing things in it and bringing that to the artists in a more accessible way was a good idea.
However, its execution was bad - mostly due to my lack of skill and resources.
While there were good ideas behind Dough, they weren't implemented well, nor did I make the capabilities accessible to people. All in, over a year of my life was effectively squandered as I burnt through all of my savings.
At that point, it would've been sensible for me to give up. While I do believe that I've done some things that have been beneficial to others, I've also objectively made very little material progress towards my goal. Or in general.
But I kept going. Beyond common sense. Maybe even beyond uncommon sense.
After more obsessive sprinting in different directions, I started to build another tool - this time, called Reigh (get it?).
After months more of work, it's close to ready. Thanks to LLMs help with coding and models from Qwen and Wan, I believe it's actually holistically very good!
I know that the next thing I must do is create stuff with it that inspires others who in turn create stuff.
But I'm exhausted.
So consider this my attempt to brute-force bootstrapping creative expression. And to keep myself somewhat accountable.
I mean, you are reading this...right? And now you're expecting me to create stuff...right?
A 'failed' gen