2025 is the year I witnessed AI fundamentally reshape our world, forcing me to pause and ponder what is valuable and important.

Personally, 2025 is an eventful one. Hacking at Denver in the spring, settling in Fukuoka in summer and once again making myself at home in the hot winter of Singapore.

Luckily as a software professional, I have a front-row seat. I built local-first applications, finished courses on Galois Theory and am now building out an orderbook system from scratch. No matter what I do, AI is indispensable.

The Boom

Back in 2023, I was working on games with pixelated art, coordinating with artists in the globe. When I first read about new models for asset generation, it was something I looked forward to adopting and speeding up our workflows with, but something that wasn't production-ready.

In 2025, 60% of technical work I'd have done by myself in the past is now done by agents, another 20% much enriched by AI. It feels strange, at the same time I smile for the productivity boost and I feel the need to catch up. "I've never felt this much behind as a programmer" as Andrej put it.

Inevitably, the paradoxical mix of relief and anxiety raises questions on what are the shelf life of skills and knowledge and what should I invest in? What should I do to adapt?

Always have been a generalist, I see the opportunities freeing myself from the endless delivery timeline and grunt work, develop additional skills and vocabularies for a much greater action space thanks to an army of agents.

The bigger questions are what the world is going to look like in a few years? What's my role in it? "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" on my bookshelf has been moved from the history corner to the self-help corner.

The change isn't just about how work is done, but what work needs to be done. There are no words to describe my excitement first time I boarded an autonomous Waymo in Los Angeles last March. It's the moment it became clear to me nothing will ever be the same.

The Doom

Also in 2025, the unfortunate Hong Kong Fire left us a vivid trauma. There is so much we take for granted and I'm reminded to be grateful for what I have. One thought that really strikes me is that the world we're living in is different, yet risks are often left unpriced.

From pandemic to election, what we learnt and what we didn't? It sounds distant to my business, but I've realized that as risks become increasingly systemic and powers more prevasive than ever, self-sovereignty is a necessity. Crypto Black Friday in October gave me a hard lesson. If history is going to rhyme with the 2008 financial crisis, it is likely due to unleashing power of AI without the antifragility.

I never bought into the "AGI War or doomsday" narratives on headlines. What concerns me the most is the reliance of centralized infrastructure, the fragility of human sovereignty among geopolitical tensions.

We already have good surveillance infrastructure inside our pocket, someone's agents capable of running untrusted computation pose new challenges on privacy. Coordinated autonomous vehicles turned weapons for terrorism paralyzing traffic aren't the plot of "I, robot" anymore but threats that we need to actively prepare for.

The silver lining is the defensive arsenal is more powerful than ever. Perhaps with AI replacing our jobs, the new role is more about what to fight for.

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.
2026 will be the year I'm taking on greater responsibility. Forget resolution. We’re in a revolution.