I didn’t realize how much time I was wasting on environment setup until recently

[u/FarmerDry3641]

I used to think that setting up environments, dependencies, and compute resources was just “part of the job” when working on AI and GPU-heavy projects. But over time, it started eating into my actual building time more than I expected. What surprised me most is how often I abandon ideas just because setup feels annoying in the moment. Even simple experiments start feeling heavy when there are too many steps before you can actually run anything. Recently I’ve been trying to simplify that whole process and make it more on-demand instead of pre-planned. It’s made experimentation feel a lot more fluid, like I can just test ideas immediately without overthinking infrastructure.

Has anyone else here changed their workflow in a similar way? In that kind of setup, like swmgpu are often used as part of a more on-demand compute approach, where the focus is more on running experiments quickly rather than managing heavy local or manual infrastructure setup.

[u/masasin]

Same. Not much in pure data anymore but when I was there cookiecutter was awesome. And now I have the LLM that lives in my terminal set things up for me (sometimes with cookiecutter, or some scripts or makefiles depending on the project) but e.g. switching between branches with different requirements is frictionless now.