I have been torn about Huggingface. They provide some wonderful services to the community, but unfortunately the API design is very unintuitive and hard to work with, as well as the documentation being outdated. Also, much of the design tries to accommodate too many standards at once, I think, and switching between them or doing other likewise things requires doing in-place operations or setting markers that permanently become part of an object instead of a chain that I can update with normal control flow operations.

This also includes that there are far too many external libraries as well that are installed with any hf stuff, and the library is very slow to load and to work with. I avoid it like the plague unless I'm required to use it, because it usually takes the most debugging time. For example, I spent well over half the time implementing a new method trying to debug huggingface before just shutting down the server because I had already spent an hour, hour and a half on tracing through the source code to try to fix it. And when I did, it was incredibly slow.

Now, that said, they also provide free models, and free access to datasets, like Imagenet. Do I wish it was an extremely light, fast, and simple wrapper? Yes. That would be great. But they do provide what they provide, and they put in a lot of effort to try to make it accessible to everyone. That's something that should not be ignored because of any potential personal beefs with the library.

All in all, it's a double-edged sword, and I wish there was a bit more simplicity, focus, self-containment, understandability and speed with respect to the hf codebase at large. But at the same time, I sincerely appreciate the models and datasets services that they offer to the community, regardless of the hoops one might have to add to get it. If one stays within the HF ecosystem, certain things are indeed pretty easy.

I hope if anyone from HF is reading this that this doesn't feel like a total dunk or anything like that. Only that I'm very torn because it's a mixed bag, and I think I can see that a lot of care really did go into a lot of this codebase, and that I think it really could be tightened down a ton for the future. There are positives about HF despite my beefs with the code (HF spaces included within this particular calculus at hand).