I like reading books. In fact, I like the idea of reading books even more. I want to learn more, but progress feels slow. So slow. I bought a lot of books this year, but I’ve only managed to read a few of them.
I am determined to watch every new video from the YouTube channels I follow. Sometimes, however, I have to unfollow certain channels because I can’t keep up, and I realize that I don’t enjoy their content as much anymore. I used to be very good at keeping up, but now I’m more than a month behind.
I love TV shows. I track them carefully so that I have a pretty good overview of what I’ve watched and what I want to watch next. However, with so many good TV shows nowadays, it’s basically impossible to keep up. April 24, 2016, was the last time that I actually had an empty watchlist. Apparently, I’ve watched 144 episodes this year. All right, I guess. If I can recommend anything, it’s Severance and Pluribus, both on Apple TV.
The same goes for movies. But I find the lengths of movies dreadful, so I prefer the shorter formats that I mentioned. No, I don’t watch TikTok, Reels, or Shorts, I hate this format. Anyway, a very long time ago, I used to go to movie theaters almost every week. This year, I went once. In total, I’ve watched eight movies this year.
Don’t get me started on games. I loved the 39 hours of Balatro that I played this year, but that’s pretty much it. And I’m still buying games here and there, though. Old habits die hard.
As I wrote in my last blog post, I was blown away by Claude Code this year. As I write this, I’m probably a bit addicted to it. Not sure if addiction is the right word, but I’m constantly thinking about solving problems with it that I could never solve before in the same amount of time. Sometimes, though, I feel like I’m solving problems just for the sake of solving them, rather than slowing down to think about the impact of what I’m building and whether it’s worth building at all. But what does that even mean? If I’m convinced it’s worth building, then it’s worth building to me. My body and mind love this flow.
It’s actually very hard to keep up with all the new AI tools and updates, even if you focus only on Claude Code and maybe ChatGPT Codex. Hard to explain to people who aren’t deep into programming. But it’s not just programming, it can basically do anything on your computer. It can read files, write files, move around files, open the browser, interact with websites, make screenshots to make sense of what’s being displayed, and so on. Like having an assistant that can do anything you want on your computer. It’s mind-blowing.
I came across this post by Andrej Karpathy that really resonated with me:
I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
— Andrej Karpathy • December 26, 2025
I guess I just have to accept that not keeping up with everything I love is just part of life now. I’m sad, but it’s okay. I’m very much looking forward to 2026, because life will most definitely get crazier. Happy New Year to all of you!