2025 In Review

Like last year, this is my somewhat rushed recollection of the year that was, and as usual it’s a mix of personal and professional reflections, with some thoughts on technology and trends thrown in for good measure.

Yeah, AI has been kind of a topic over the past few years, and we’re now at a point where the hype is under so much pressure to become real that things are either turning into diamonds or starting to crumble into carbon dust.

But it’s pretty obvious that we’re already going into a cultural feedback loop–this is what I got when I prompted for a magazine cover that was “about agentic AI”, and I think it’s the perfect reflection of our collective unconscious:

One of my takeaways from the year is that people outside (or inside) the tech circle keep falling into the trap of either anthropomorphizing AI or dismissing it out of hand–and both are the wrong way to deal with it, especially the Luddite take.

Another is that a fair amount of folk are finally aware of the economic implications of AI not panning out and the bubble finally bursting, either at the hardware level (I am somewhat happy I don’t own any NVIDIA stock) or by OpenAI imploding in some way.

But for people like me, AI has indeed been a force multiplier. There were three times this year where, for me, models stepped over different qualitative thresholds, and the upshot is that now, at the tail end of 2025, I finally trust them to help me accomplish real work–with proper guidance, of course (which arguably implies experience and forethought).

A few examples:

• I now use GPT-5.2 (and the 5.x-codex variants) on an almost daily basis to generate scaffolding, review code and add the kind of uniformity and standardized logging that I would find too boring to hash out. One of the most noticeable inflection points has been around generating unit tests and UI components that I then polish. For me, it’s turned front-end development into a commodity–I routinely give Copilot a couple of URLs, tell it to “build a Preact UI for this API with that base CSS”, and all the drudgery just vanishes.
• I have started making a list of the gripes I have with particular pieces of software and just diving in and fixing them, even if I’m not familiar with that stack or tooling. I typically ask for an assessment of the codebase, then for guidance in structure and feature mapping, and then progressively zoom in until I can match my gripes with a section of the code which I then either hack at myself or write a brief on what I think needs to be done and iterate upon until it becomes an implementation/testing checklist. (like many others, I’ve found that having any kind of tests/linting significantly improves LLM performance, even if I still need to double-check any tests it writes). This is massive since I can now tackle any kind of codebase, and my list of personal projects is now officially out of control.
• All my long-form posts are grammar-checked in VS Code using GPT-5-mini, since given that I often draft them over many weeks I have a tendency to skip words here and there, repeat myself a few paragraphs down or use awkward phrasing. With the right prompt and a simple MCP server I wrote to help it validate links, it will flag those, let me fix them, and clean out all the markup and formatting:

• I’ve used the “consumer” Copilot several times to do shopping research or look up electronic components, with arguably better results than doing it myself (mostly in the sense that it still gets things wrong and fails to find the exact kind of thing I want, yet it not only saves me time but also gives me options I wouldn’t have thought of)
• At work, I take call transcripts, save them to plain text, and use my own prompts to capture open issues and project requirements that the default Teams call summary typically misses. Then I collate those into the next stage.
• Instead of going through a document template and wasting time and focus on grinding out the placeholders, I can now generate work documents that are 50% “ready” by carefully compiling and curating inputs into the kind of brief that I used to write in the past for ad agencies and legal process (it really helps having a background in translating terms to a different audience), and I have been building small single-page web apps to reformat those into the typical artifacts my day job requires

I think we’re steadily in diminishing-returns territory now, but atMs are definitely here to stay–my only (recurring) doubt is how long people will tolerate error-prone outcomes, and then I realize our entire civilization hasn’t minded using flawed technology for as long as I can remember…

Although things are OK (I’m pretty much over last year’s burnout), this year I’m not really deriving a strong sense of accomplishment from work–there’s been some variety in projects, teams, and cultural immersion (my Italian comprehension is much better, and I hope to tackle more languages soon), but as someone whose sense of self has always been too closely coupled to what I work on, it’s been hard to keep motivated as the tech spirals into almost pure hype and wave after wave of reorgs keep sweeping over my corner of the org chart.

And I think that is the issue for me. I’m very much used to rotation given that the projects I get involved in have tended to become shorter, but I feel shoehorned into my immediate geography by completely arbitrary decisions and the additional friction brought on by org chart and strategy changes to go after too many shiny things per quarter are all something I could well do without.

All of the above, plus my having recently hit the ten year mark at Microsoft, tinges my expectations of what I can accomplish next, and the struggle to find an occupation with more oversight, more focus time and, most importantly, going back to something with truly global reach is very much real–even if I have clearly picked the wrong industry to pursue it.

Given the economic uncertainty, I decided against upgrading anything of consequence in my setup this year, so other than getting an additional cheap tunable LED light to give me more indirect light during the cold season, my office improvements, such as they were, were very much about making do with the stuff I already have (which is why I’ve been systematically upgrading my 3D printers rather than buying a new one) and fishing out stuff from eBay–like the HomePod Mini, which has substantially grown on me for both music and yelling at lights.

But I did get new gear as an extension of my industrial/IoT testing, and there were some great surprises–I am very, very happy with the MiniBook X (I revised a good deal of this year’s posts on it, including this one, and it’s now my default travel computer) and I am still using the Supernote Nomad (mostly on weekends).

Together, those two kind of make up for the fact that my iPad Mini 5 is on its last legs and incentivize me to spend more time in our sunny living room.

Our ISP and Wi-Fi upgrade, together with the ruthless elimination of nearly all non-Zigbee devices, were the most significant changes this year, and allowed me to reorganize not just our entire home network but also, in particular, my closet homelab.

Over the past few months I added and removed a few nodes from my setup as I tested a few new machines, but the core seems pretty stable–the TerraMaster F4-424 Max is, despite its NAS heritage, probably the machine I use the most indirectly (seeing as it hosts most of the LXC containers I develop on), and most of my heavy compute is still done in my little borg “cube”, which I’m still quite happy to have padded out with 128GB RAM now that it’s hosting a bunch of small local AI models and beefy virtual machines.

The rest has stayed pretty consistent.

I’ve tried to do something useful with my free time that isn’t coding or electronics, but the past few years seem to have killed my motivation to do music consistently (even if I still pick up the Xsynth to doodle every now and then).

With colder weather, I’ve been back doing hardware projects (which has been a recurring pattern over the years) and keyboards have become a thing that I developed an interest in, since as electronics projects they’re trivial but afford me a tangible artifact I can use daily.

But I’ve got a few more things that I’ve been building and testing slowly, and I like the fastidiousness and attention to first principles hardware provides.

Most of my “TV” is… YouTube. And sometime this year I made a conscious decision to severely curate my subscriptions and constantly ask myself “Is this teaching me something?” every five minutes.

There are obviously people like Michael Fisher who are superlative storytellers and hark back to my mobile roots (plus a few other “creators”) that I watch for their sheer quality, but the things I watch for hours on end (typically while exercising) are The Vergecast, Decoder, and other excellent content from Nilay Patel’s team.

Despite their US bias in picking out relevant tech, they ask the right questions about where the industry is going and help keep the hype in check.

As far as real TV goes, other than Pluribus, things have been remarkably quiet. I did very much enjoy Slow Horses and the recent reboot of All Creatures Great and Small, but rewatching House and tapping into non-Western culture through movies like Ne Zha were the main themes.

And yes, I’ve stuck to reading a book every two weeks or so, although this year I decided to mostly revisit old favorites.

I haven’t done much gaming this year–but consolidation is real: we’re still streaming games from our Xbox and a Bazzite-based Steam box, and completely skipped the Switch 2 or any other dedicated piece of hardware other than a couple of controllers.

Steam also has the advantage of carrying dozens of extraordinary indie games that are not only cheaper but usually get cheaper over time, so it encourages spacing out game purchases, which is fine by me (but we did get Silk Song and Hades 2 in Early Access).

Getting my gallbladder taken out was a great excuse to get back to doing moderate (but consistent, daily) exercise, and it’s done wonders for my mood even if it has had limited physical impact.

As it happens, I had actually gotten myself a treadmill a few months before, and it now sees around an hour of daily use. In fact, I’ve become hooked on light exercise to the point where I actively seek it out during breaks, which is good since my shift back to a Central European schedule has trounced most opportunities I had for long walks at lunchtime.

On the other hand, I’m definitely starting to get cabin fever on a regular basis. Many of my best friends now live abroad, and even if socializing via the occasional video call has become routine, this year I’ve found myself wanting to leave the house more regularly and actually visited the local office for meetings and some social interaction.