Stable Diffusion

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “id like for this to be a hobby like how stable diffusion became a hobby for me. (endlessly interesting to this day)”

  POSITIVE · Reddit · 2026-08-15

• “I actively prefer running Stable Diffusion locally because that's easier to fix the last 5% than having to deal with a completely different 5% wrong each time.”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-26

• “the inpainting model added a grumpy old man in a top hat. I don't recall clicking the "Add creepy old man" button. At the time this was Stable Diffusion on the backend, run by a variety of model hosting services, Amazon being one. They all had different requirements for the input image and that made things really complex. For some the aspect ratio was impossible to meet, and it would fail if the banner was 200x60. For others, you had to resize it before input, which meant you were adding an image with poor resolution to start. Garbage in, garbage out.”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-22

• “capable of running pretty powerful open stable diffusion and large language models”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-13

• “It doesn't take much effort to get some art with a sense of originality or flow from Stable Diffusion”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-27

• “I personally find using stable-diffusion.cpp on the command line to be considerably easier to figure out.”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-02-11

• “messing around with Stable Diffusion in its early days (my then-current graphics card didn't have enough ram to run it), played with it a bit after an upgrade and that was it”

  LUKEWARM · Hacker News · 2026-01-23

• “I'm not gonna wait 10 min for one image on my computer like I did back in the Stable Diffusion days”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-01-17

• “productizing an image diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 1.5 when I started) in a novel (at the time) way and it ended up growing legs of it's own”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-18

• “finetuning has been all about since stable diffusion 1.5 and especially SDXL. And even something StabilityAI base models excelled at in the open weights category.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-08-08

• “leading me to discover Stable Diffusion (1.5). I began experimenting with Easy Diffusion WebUI, then transitioned to A1111 because of its better support for extensions. This sparked my curiosity in shell scripting, Python setup, and even Linux”

  POSITIVE · features · Reddit · 2025-05-16

• “Stable Diffusion is free and you can run it on your own PC with your own electricity”

  POSITIVE · price · Reddit · 2025-05-08

• “I would consider Stable Diffusion 1.4 in 2022 and Deepseek R1/V3 this year as markers of "good enough" for the things I've always wanted to use the technology for”

  POSITIVE · performance · Reddit · 2025-05-04

• “out of all image generation models I tested, including all kinds of Stable Diffusion checkpoints and extra LoRAs, this is the first one that can draw a passable LCARS interface if you ask for it”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-04-04

• “I have to download 200GB of models for Stable Diffusion to do”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Reddit · 2024-12-19

• “Stable Diffusion 3.5: Actually quite good! The system requirements are high, but lower than Flux, and unlike Flux this model isn't distilled”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2024-11-12

• “the best variant to do what u want is to use Stable diffusion locally”

  MIXED · features · Reddit · 2024-08-21