I think the most important change in 2026 is that I'm allowing myself to explore projects I wouldn't have tackled before. I can do them very quickly and without the energy drain they used to require.

Repeat With Me

Something I've been meaning to do for a while is strengthen my knowledge in probability, statistics, and machine learning. I wanted to start studying more and doing spaced repetitions, but I didn't feel like dealing with creating so many cards and all that.

So, I built a spaced repetitions app where I can throw in a text and it automatically generates cards for me.

Then I do sessions where an LLM evaluates whether my answers are satisfactory, weak, or just plain wrong.

I can even have a short conversation where it explains why my answer was wrong, and ask it to create cards about those explanations right there.

This is easily a 3 or 4 month project. I did it in an afternoon.

Medium-term Projects

I have two bigger projects I'm working on:

AI-first game engine: I already mentioned it in the MCP post. A 2D game engine designed from scratch to be used with code agents.

Cauce: a protocol for synthesizing communication from different sources into an agent-friendly space. The idea is to be able to create agents that handle my communication in an idiosyncratic way. I'm working on a reference implementation in Rust.

So Now What?

My concern is that, eventually, not programming will make my brain muscles go soft. It's a valid concern: if you stop exercising something, you lose it.

But I'm already 40 years old. It's a stage where people generally stop programming as much and move into manager roles. This is similar in a way: I'm stopping writing code directly to move into directing who writes it.

What does excite me a lot is reducing the mental load of implementation and taking advantage of that space that not having to program gives me to be the best father I can be for Dorian, to study and learn new and more complex things.

I hope this series has been useful to you, find me out there if you have questions or comments, I'm not on social media, but I'm around somewhere otherwise hi at the domain of this post.