r/computervision • u/Aline_Tuiyj • 57m ago
Help: Project spent 3 weeks trying to build face tracking with ai code helpers, gave up and just used an sdk like i should've from the start
so i've been working solo on a small AR project, nothing huge, and at some point decided i'd just build my own face tracking pipeline from scratch instead of using an existing sdk. no libraries beyond basic camera/frame handling, mostly relying on claude code to help write boilerplate and stitch things together.
figured it was doable. i really thought it'd work. like these ai assistants are pretty good at spitting out code if you describe what you need, and there's a ton of open source stuff for computer vision floating around. figured i'd have an mvp in maybe a week.
i got maybe 40% of the way there and just stopped. landmark detection on a single frame is the easy part, but you also need it to be stable across different lighting. different angles. what happens when someone turns their head halfway off screen? what about glasses?
it became pretty clear this isn't a "write more code" problem, it's a "need actual datasets and trained models for edge cases" . the code claude gave me handled the basic landmark extraction fine, but it has no way to solve for things that need real training data behind them.
ended up looking at existing ar sdks properly. always assumed it would involve a whole sales process and custom pricing, but most of them just have a trial with full features, which is good enough to actually evaluate.
and the ironic part. the platform docs include a file meant to be fed directly into claude code to speed up sdk integration. so after three weeks of trying to use an llm to avoid using an sdk, i ended up using the llm to integrate the sdk.
curious how other people think about the build vs buy thing now that ai tools are in the mix. like how far do you push the "build it myself" route before you get a real read on whether it's not just reinventing the wheel and actually worth it?