Another big year. AI is starting to show major flaws. Anecdotally, on Reddit, there seems to be a lot of growing anti-AI sentiment, especially after Microsoft 'forced' an upgraded AI subscription on users.

AI

AI use was mandated at my job. Personally, this sucks for me; not because AI is bad, but quite the contrary. It's so effective at coding that a couple of problems arise:

• My workday went from roughly (coding, planning, testing/reviews)

(20%, 40%, 40%), to (5%, 30%, 65%)

This is my issue with it. I already spent too much time on non-coding tasks, and now it's even worse.

• Getting too much work done

This is mostly a good thing. There are real gains to be had; I'm blasting through projects faster than ever.

There are problems with this, however; in that by getting more projects and features done, context switching is at an all time high. Context switching is not productive for me.

• Expectations are through the roof

I've had to spend more time curbing the expectations of non-technical people. Their expectations tend to the ridiculous. Projects still take time. The bottlenecks have barely changed.

Overall, AI has increased my output quite a bit. But the added stress and dissatisfaction aren't worth it in my opinion. Considering the costs (and expected costs), I think the hype will die down a little. We have already seen this with Microsoft Copilot.

Side projects

Didn't take the time to work on side projects unfortunately.

I did spend a lot of time playing around and learning though, mostly with Go and Python.

Goals for next year

• Learn Rust or C++
• Maybe make a game
• Write more blog posts

There just aren't enough hours in the day!