Well, today was one of those days. I had a clear plan to make progress on my video analysis and work-instruction projects, but things just kept breaking. It felt like every step forward came with a new, unexpected problem, and I spent most of my time putting out fires instead of building. A classic day of groundwork where you end the day feeling like you’ve barely moved.
Here’s a rundown of the struggles and takeaways:
- Broken paths, again. In the work-instructions project, which uses an LLM to generate procedures, all the image and video paths broke on me. Again. I suspect it has something to do with a recent interaction with the ChatGPT API, but I’m not sure why. It’s frustrating because I thought I’d finally stabilized that part.
- The surprise GPT-4 limit. I was trying to debug the issue and suddenly hit a 5-hour usage limit on GPT-4. I had no idea that was a thing, and it completely caught me off guard. Another lesson learned the hard way.
- The pressure of a POC. We have a conference coming up and need a Proof of Concept for the video analysis tool. The goal is to show a simple station that can analyze a video of an assembly process, measure task times, and export a report. This deadline is forcing me to refactor the monolithic code, but I’m also starting to wonder if this refactoring effort is the best use of time right now.
- Hardware gremlins. To top it all off, my computer wouldn’t start this morning—just a black screen with a cursor. I spent half an hour convinced my hard drive had died before it magically fixed itself. I’m still worried it’s a sign of a bigger problem to come.
It’s frustrating when you feel like you’re doing a lot of work without getting that positive feedback loop of seeing things come together. Some days are just a slog, and you have to accept that you’re laying foundations you can’t see yet. Today was definitely one of those.
Next: Focus on getting a barebones version of the video analysis POC working for the upcoming demo.
Tags: LLM, Video Analysis, Refactoring, POC, Debugging, Developer Log
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