tl;dr:
Do the thing.
edit: I've just realized that this is the same exact tldr from 2024 in review. Hooray for consistency, I guess?
Major life events
The first quarter of the year centered around us navigating our first full Maine winter, buying our house in Rockland, and generally getting settled. It's nice to have a solid sense of place. We can walk to Main Street! We can walk to the library! Rafi and I miss the coffee truck that we walked to in Tampa, but we've got plenty of options here that I'm sure we'll work into our routine over time.
This was the first time I experienced a summer in Maine, and it felt genuinely magical. Our yard isn't cursed by black flies, and the mosquitoes up here seem to be sluggish oafs compared to their nimble Florida-man counterparts. We spent as much time outside as possible, even moreso than the time we'd spend outside in Florida winters. This year, I need to make beach days a regularly scheduled activity—I found too many excuses to not go and enjoy the incredible shores we have mere minutes away from where we live.
A Short Agentic Coding Diatribe
Work held some unpleasantly novel experiences for me. The AI mandate was in full force, and I got a front row seat to how a high-functioning product/engineering team can be derailed when strategic focus gets replaced by solutions in search of a problem. The temptation to build AI features, or build more features with AI, led to shifting priorities and unclear goals.
In other words, lots of speed yielded little velocity. On the other hand, I also found myself knocking out a bunch of work using Claude Code. On the other hand, it was very easy to let quality slip when shoveling out slop. On the other hand, that slop was solving problems that never would have been tackled in the first place. On the OTHER hand, maybe those problems didn't need to be solved in the first place?
The core idea that has emerged from this experience is a reinforcement of something I've been learning repeatedly for a decade now: focus beats everything else. It is both the constraint on and the enabler of impactful work. Having a software factory that can mass-produce code is not very helpful if you don't have enough work to put in front of it.
I've heard the argument made that if software is commoditized and cheaper to produce, then you can build nine wrong things as long as the tenth is correct. That might hold true in a vacuum, but in practice those nine false starts can have real impact—especially if you're putting them in front of users. In other words, knowing what to build is still the constraint.
For now, I'm trying to keep anything that is properly "vibe-coded" limited to the domain of prototypes and one-offs; things that I plan on throwing away once I'm done with them. Disposable software, so to speak.
What's in store for 2026?
As much as I'd like to be optimistic, it seems that 2026 writ large will be successful if we get to the end of it feeling that we've survived mostly intact. I have a feeling that this will be a year of struggle, even if personally and professionally it's set up to be a year of plenty.
I much prefer to engage with dystopiæ through fiction.
A Selection of Books I Read that I Think are Worth Reading (or, at least, that I enjoyed)
- Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
- World of the Five Gods trilogy by Lois McMaster Bujold
- The Blacktongue Thief and The Daughter's War by Christopher Buehlman
- The Blade Itself and subsequent books of The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
- Between Two Fires by Christoper Buehlman
- There's more I'm forgetting, but these are the ones that recency bias forced to the top of my mind.
Lessons Learned
- Summers can be wonderful! Growing up where summers were usually hellscapes, our first Maine summer was a beautiful experience.
- Community, no matter how small, is critical.
- Folks are sleeping on small towns.
- Don't sit on a bad situation. Nobody is served by having someone in the wrong role or environment, and working on a solution as early as possible usually means you'll fix things faster. A corollary is that it's possible to try and improve a bad situation while also seeking a way out, and not doing so in parallel can only make things worse. In other words, I'll be starting a new role at a new startup soon!