So yesterday I finally got my hands dirty with Prodigy2 after hearing all the buzz. Let me walk you through exactly how it went down, step by messy step.
The Starting Point
First things first – I had to download the thing. Went to their site, clicked the big download button. Bam. Zip file landed on my desktop. Unzipped it right there like always. Double-clicked the installer like a total newbie. Got slapped with a security warning. Windows yelled at me about “unrecognized app.” Had to dig into system settings to override it. Always makes me nervous when that happens.
Once installed, I fired it up. Blank screen. Minimal interface. Zero hand-holding. Typical dev tool. Felt lost for a solid five minutes clicking random buttons.
The Real Work Begins
Here’s what actually worked for me:
Opened my messy dataset CSV file first. Weirdly, Prodigy2 didn’t just swallow it whole. Had to map columns like “text” and “label” manually. Took three tries.
Clicked the “create task” button blindly. Chose “text classification” since that’s what I needed. Got confused about project names vs task names. Just used “test_project” like a coward.
Finally hit “load data.” It choked. My CSV had some funky commas in it. Deleted those rows like pulling weeds.
Suddenly – golden. The interface popped alive. First text sample: “Review our new coffee blend.” Clicked “positive” as a test. Arrow key moved me to next one. Felt like playing a very boring video game.
Finding My Rhythm
Spammed keyboard shortcuts like my life depended on it
Accidentally skipped twenty entries when my elbow hit shift+tab
Discovered the “bulk label” option only after doing 80 manually
The Tipping Point
Around the 300th label, something clicked. Started flying through entries. Pattern recognition kicked in. Funny how your brain adapts to repetitive tasks. Finished my sample set faster than expected.
Then came the test run. Trained a model with default settings like a true amateur. Surprise – it actually kinda worked! Fed it new sentences like “service was terrible” and “amazing sunset view.” It correctly flagged the first as negative, second as positive. Shocked it worked on my mess of data.
Ended up exporting the model just to see the file size. Tiny. Like suspiciously tiny. Won’t pretend to understand how they packed all that into 12MB.
My fingers hurt from clicking, my coffee went cold three times, but damn if it didn’t actually do what they promised. Still plenty of questions, but hey – progress.
