A guy at the Denver AI meetup told me my demo was "just a wrapper" and honestly he wasn't wrong
So I went to this small AI meetup in Denver last Thursday, maybe 30 people in a coworking space, and I showed off a little tool I built that summarizes long PDFs. This guy in a hoodie watches the whole demo, then says "that's just a wrapper on top of someone else's model, right?" and I got kinda defensive at first. But then he pulled up his laptop and showed me how he fine tuned a small open model on 2,000 of his own documents for like $40 in compute, and it did my job better and faster. I sat there realizing I'd spent two weeks on a UI and zero time on anything underneath it. Has anyone else had a moment where someone at a meetup just quietly took apart your whole project like that?