The progress in AI is great, but very hard to keep up with (or understand). It's real to me once it makes it into Automatic1111.
I don't like how SD consolidated around the A1111 repo. The features are great, and it was fantastic when SD was brand new... but the performance and compatibility is awful, the setup is tricky, and it sucked all the oxygen out of the room that other SD UIs needed to flourish.
If you want another UI to flourish, clone both it and A111, copy and paste the bits from A111 you’d like to have in yours (with attribution) and push it up along with any features you personally want.
That does require developer time, and developers may converge on a popular implementation with good tests and lots of features as it’s easier to contribute.
The bottleneck isn’t really the community though, it’s the developers.
I worked trying to add torch.compile support to A1111 for a bit, fixing some graph breaks locally, but... It was too much. Some other things, like ML compilation backends, are also basically impossible.
Facebook's AITemplate backend even supports long prompts now.
- The codebase is cleaner more hackable, and (compared to base SAI code) more performant.
- HF continues to put lots of work into optimization and cleanup. For instance, they ensure there are no graph breaks for torch.compile, and work with other hardware vendors for thier own SD implementations.
I ended up using https://github.com/easydiffusion/easydiffusion
which has served me well so far.
While it has a fraction of the features found in stable-diffusion-webui, it has the best out of the box UI I've tried so far.The way it enqueues tasks and renders the generated images beats anything I've seen in the various UIs I've played with.
I also like that you can easily write plugins in Javascript, both for the UI and for server-side tweaks.
I use A1111 as a tool, but if I want to goof off, I queue up a bunch of prompts in Easy Diffusion and end up with a gallery built in real time. Its smaller feature set make it great for that.