I Built A Monster Model Before I Built a Working One

I spent 10 days building my first competition ML model. It had transformers, attention pooling, multiple input branches. It scored 0.500. The Competition With about 2 weeks of summer left, I decided to jump into my first ML competition. I had always browsed Kaggle competitions and found them fascinating, if not a tiny bit intimidating. I kept waiting for the perfect opportunity to jump in, something easy, but not boring. At some point, I realized that there’s no point waiting. If I was going to fail, I might as well fail early. So I took the plunge. I started working on this competition called BIRDCLEF+ 2026, where the goal was to build a model that understands what specific animal/bird sounds are present in a clip of audio, and predicts the probabilities of each one being present. I wasn’t going to code everything myself, I decided to use some level of AI assistance for the coding and understand the overall workflow of finishing a model from end to end, while getting comfortable with