Last few weeks, one of my side projects was an AI YouTube thumbnail generator.

6-stage pipeline. AI art director to analyze titles. A judge to pick the best concepts. Scene designer. Trained LoRA for face consistency. Built like a real design team.

It was complex. It was cool. I was ready to launch.

Then ChatGPT released Image-2 and killed it.

5 seconds. $20/mo plan. Better output than my entire pipeline.

Don't build where the frontier eats.