2025 in Review

Before welcoming in 2026, I thought I'd take some time to look back and take stock. This past year brought a lot of big changes; I'll focus on these four: company, brain, family, and work.

Distill

Hawaii Offsite

Our original vision for Distill was to use LLMs to structure person and company data. By mid-2025, our team at Distill had built a bunch of tools by following the thread of what users were asking for - but new users kept asking "what do I do next?", telling us our product wasn't clear enough.

At our October offsite in Hawaii, the team reviewed other products in our orbit - sales tools, recruiting tools, new "social networks", etc. and we realized that the sales tools were making serious money, and they all kinda sucked to use - built for the economic buyer, hard to figure out. We wondered - is there a play for a PLG full-stack tool that does search & outreach on rails? Could we find you the right prospects, find the best way to reach them, and then find the best messaging to get their attention, all within a few minutes?

So we went from "deeply researched profiles on people and companies" to "help founders find and reach the right people with outbound that actually works."

Compared to where we were a few months ago, we have a better sense of what people want and a clearer product for them. Now we get to make the impossible possible.

Second brain

Since February, I've found a system for augmenting my thinking that actually works - I've stuck with it and loved how much better I can remember things.

I have an AI code editor over my markdown notes, with lots of custom instructions on how to help me do monthly planning, make decisions, take notes and manage tasks. With this setup, I can do my own writing and also leverage an AI to do the things I'm bad at - writing things down so I can remember them later. It's been particularly helpful for managing my finances; I do accounting like twice a year, so encoding my financial processes as markdown files has saved the many hours I would have needed to "load everything back into my memory".

I like the idea of encoding my practices and values into my docs and then having the LLM remind me of best practices and what I've learned, compensating for my mind's "shiny object" distraction and forgetfulness.

For the first time in a long time (since I worked on Astrid?), I'm on top of my email inbox, money tasks, and more. It's a system that's easy to improve (I just write more documents) so I get the feeling of making progress even as I'm using it to get through my daily life.

Family Life

Assisi, Italy

For the past year, I had this nagging feeling that our older daughter E wasn't learning as much as she could, so we had been contemplating making a change. Four months in, E is loving her new school - it was hard to leave our neighborhood school, say goodbye to her friends, and learn a whole new system, but she's doing well with a smaller class and more attention. As a foundation for so many other things, math is the one subject I've been hoping she falls in love with and I've been thrilled with how that has gone. I hope she never thinks "I'm bad at math".

Our younger daughter Z started preschool - unfortunately, she's not loving her new school as much but we're riding the wave of parenting a three year old. It's a bit easier the second time around but the tantrums are still just as loud and long.

With both kids in school, my wife and I actually have time to plan ahead and think about the future, and that's been a game-changer too. We did a 3 week trip to Italy as a family - it was hard, but glad we did it, and family travel is never something we regret. Taking the kids to jam-packed Florence for Easter was so cool.

Agentic coding

Github contributions over 2025

On the work front, in July our team switched to using Claude Code as our main coding engine, and I had my most productive year from a commits standpoint ever, all while also handling the CTO, founder, eng manager, code reviewer hats.

I've come to really enjoy pairing with the AI and have learned new tricks over time - like having the AI build mermaid diagrams of existing code before working on bigger changes.

One of the coolest things I built recently is "Autofix", where you can paste a bug report, and the AI will read it, load all the attached screenshots from the ticket, open a Chrome browser to login and reproduce the bug, take a screenshot, fix it, and make a pull request with before / after, all (hopefully) without human intervention. In 2026 I'm hoping to help our team get to a new level as we get ready to launch to a broader audience - to be able to maintain the highest quality of code & product while addressing issues and building things insanely fast.

Stepping back, it feels like the practice of software engineering is never going to be the same. It seems like a good thing overall, but I can't help but worry that raising my expectations for my team's productivity and throughput comes with a human cost that we haven't reckoned with yet.

Small wins

Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

As a coda, some things that I loved about this year:

• Russ and I did a co-founders + spouses trip to Paris - just one of those things that's a dream come true. Walking along Rue Saint-Honore talking about the future of our company while shopping was epic.
• I got a walking treadmill for my desk, it's been great and I use it every day.
• I started two analog hobbies - collecting vinyl records and using fountain pens. A sure sign that I'm getting old!

Closing Thoughts

Looking ahead to 2026, I'm excited to keep pulling on all of the threads above, and I'm hoping life doesn't get any more complex for us, as it has a habit of doing.

I'm so grateful for my wife, the kiddos, and everyone at Distill for putting up with me and being on the journey together.

Cheers to a new year.