Remember when you had to manually label thousands of images for a simple model?
I was looking at some old project files from maybe 2018, and it hit me how much the data prep step has changed. Back then, for a basic image classifier to tell a dog from a cat, I'd spend a solid week just drawing boxes and typing labels. It was brutal, mind-numbing work. Now, with the auto-labeling tools in platforms like Roboflow, you can feed it a few hundred images and it gets you 80% of the way there in an hour. The big shift, in my view, came from better pre-trained models that can suggest labels, not just from faster computers. It turned the most boring part of the job into something you can actually get through in a morning. Has anyone else gone back to an old project and been stunned by how much time a new tool would save now?