It's that time of year, Coming back to work out of a big break and thinking about big changes.

Daily Notes #

Keep up with daily notes, maybe not here, I tend to have more targeted notes here with full blog posts, but for work daily notes is POG and needs to be leaned on. LLM's do really good at ingesting markdown and reminding me of things that I need to do, or did, or need to follow up on.

Reader #

Social media is changing, quickly becoming enshitified, I enjoy interacting with some of the people I've met online, reading their opinions, and learning from their experiences. I don't need their hot takes, don't care about their political takes. I like boring posts that typically fade out of whats picked up on the algorithm. I like a good 5-10 minute read or a long form podcast talk. I will be aggressively collecting more rss feeds to read and keep up with.

(Neo)Vim #

I've had these bad habits in my config for years, from day one of using vim. It's time to kill these. jjgww. I killed them this morning, we will see how long I keep typing out jj all over my editor before I fix it mentally.


-- bad habits
vim.keymap.set("i", "jj", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "jk", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "JJ", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "jJ", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "Jj", "<esc>")

Tip

I need to lean on <C-o> a little more to run single commands in normal mode from insert mode. The pattern that is hitting me hard right now is jjgwwA insert mode, format, insert at end of line.

Distrobox #

I was a heavy user of distrobox as my primary dev environment on Bazzite and I need to get back there. I have a lot of stuff installed on this current system. I've been sloppy. I am not sure I was planning on staying on arch/hyprland long, I did it to do it with my son, his got borked a month ago and he is back to bazzite, I think I'll be back there and want to be ready to float freely between distros.

  • clean dotfiles
  • work from a distrobox image that I make
  • keep working projects backed up

Vibe Coding #

Agents are the future, people that I really trust are on both sides of the argument. Some saying they stopped coding months ago and claude does everything for them. Some in between, some are completely against.

It feels like the tooling has really taken off over the past few months, the models are getting better, but not at the same rate they were. The tools are really making this possible.

My experience is quite mixed, I'm often impressed with what it does, and appalled at how bad it does other things. I just want it to do what I mean with the fewest words possible. I've been working on deeper plans more and more, still with mixed results. With larger plans the models seem to do more work, but still not getting that great experience every time.

I really need to get my workspaces workflow down, have models working in a separate workspace, and be willing to throw away shit code quickly and try again from another angle.

The future is a deep understanding on what needs to be done, how do to it, and not the syntax. The tools are getting better. You need to know less and less about them, less and less about models as the auto routers get better. The core skills of architecture, design, and implementation are more important than ever.

Last year I was able to vibe out some POC work, but still not letting the agents touch my production code. It wasn't there for me, I probably did not have access to the really good stuff either. Now I think what I have access to is catching up to Claude.

  • sandbox them
  • quick to POC
  • quick to move on from broken attempts
  • learn to lead
  • learn to let go of syntax opinions
  • learn what makes good products/tools/apis hold the vibes to this.

There's something here, very respectable people are betting on this, but its not working for me, I don't think I have the right tools. I already have it a day, and got a few hundred LOC out while theo is claiming opus can do 10k.

Not Everything will be a side hustle #

I've tried to start too many side hustles, none of them work out. Thinking of them as a side hustle steals the joy of the hobby. I have too much going on outside of work for adding things like this not to add stress to already stressful situations, I need to reduce stress and find the joy and happiness in side projects and not turn everything into something more.

Keebs #

This one is fresh on the mind only because I just built out a new keyboard for work. I want to have a good robust build at home, work, and potentially have a good backup. I have a good design that is very cheap and fairly easy to build, but is quite time consuming. I am going to put some work in early this year to get a couple of clones.

More Offline #

Looking back at 2025, I actually did fairly well of doing a bit more offline. It's been a hard transition out of pandemic times for our family, we had a lot of extra health precautions that lasted longer than most other people.

This year I should do more of this. More bike rides, more skate, more basement hangouts, more art.

New dart board in the basement

More creativity. I designed and built fingerboard obstacles to work like legos with 3/4" plywood last November.

building a fingerboard park in the basement

More building

building set for Jolly Holiday with Rhiannon

building boxes for Jolly Holiday with Wyatt

More bike rides, fewer nice days wasted, they are relaxing and get good energy out.

Bike Rides

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