2025 in Retrospect

The year 2025 wasn't just turbulent. It was a rupture in the timeline. The kind of year you look back on and realize: everything before this was one game, and everything after is another.

The Personal Pivot

I left Germany.

Not dramatically. Not recklessly. But deliberately. Because the realization finally settled in: creating software and trading requires nothing but a laptop and WiFi. You can work from anywhere.

But let me be clear about something the influencers won't tell you: don't romanticize the nomadic life unless you've earned it. The risk isn't financial — it's psychological. Without a base salary or recurring income, volatility doesn't just hit your bank account. It hits your nervous system. Your decision-making. Your identity.

Remote work is hard to get. Building a profitable business takes years. Trading? At least 2-3 years before you break even, if you're disciplined.
The version most people see is highly edited. The reality is unglamorous: debugging at 11 PM, missing family and friends, wondering if you made the right call.

For me, everything aligned. My trading was consistent. My software projects were generating income. So I took the shot.

But the year wasn't just about me.

My sister married her long-term boyfriend in September. The only time off I took all year. It was worth it.
One week later, she gave birth to her daughter. Before I left Germany, I held my little niece. A beautiful little princess.

And in the background, quietly, I finished two projects I'd been building since 2023 — a trading chatroom and a comprehensive course. Nights, weekends, mornings before the markets opened.
I learned more than I expected: websockets, real-time messaging architecture, group room messaging, direct messaging flows. It was brutal and brilliant.

But none of that compares to what happened to the industries I work in.

The Paradigm Shift

Trading and software development didn't just change in 2025.
They were disrupted.

And we're not going back.

I've never felt more alive about the future than I do right now.
Life feels less like a grind and more like a game again. Like being a kid in a sandbox, figuring things out as you go. Not the suffocating weight of adult responsibility — managing a thousand fires at once.

The reason is AI.

It's not just a tool. It's a distinct species.
For the first time in human history, we've created technology that rivals — and in many cases, exceeds — human intelligence. Right now, the best AI might match the smartest human on Earth. But in 5-10 years? It'll have the combined intelligence of all humans. Maybe more.

And here's what makes the next decade so electric: we haven't figured out how to use it yet.

This year we saw incredible releases. Google's Gemini 3.0 model.
Video generators like Veo 3 and Sora 2 that can conjure entire scenes from text.
LLMs that reason, think, and write with startling sophistication. But despite headlines about "plateaus," I think we're still at the beginning.

The Death of the Old Paradigm

For years, software development was about CRUD: Create, Read, Update, Delete. You worked with data. You built forms, tables, dashboards. You learned frameworks. You memorized syntax.

I spent years doing that.

I spent years learning the old way — courses, documentation, tutorials, weeks lost to bugs that made me question my intelligence. Most of what I built never shipped. But I loved and hated the struggle.

That era is over.

Software development is no longer primarily about typing. It's not about reading docs or npm package documentation. It's about prompting. Describing what you want. The AI does the heavy lifting.
It's unbelievable how fast the shift happened. Almost overnight.

The timeline from idea to MVP collapsed from three months to two weeks. Sometimes less.

The Competence Paradox

But here's the thing that keeps me up at night.

I've been average at most things I've tried.
Average intelligence. Average developer skills. Average at engineering hardware. Below average at drawing, music, sports.

But I compensated with work. Repetition. Doing things over and over until they became second nature. I had great mentors who pulled me through the hardest challenges.

AI changes that equation entirely.

It elevates the average developer to good. The good developer to great. The great developer to legendary.
It's a force multiplier.

But it comes with a hidden cost: you stop struggling.

Think about it. I used to spend three weeks wrestling with a bug. Reading stack traces. Rewriting architecture. Trying five different approaches. My brain was building neural pathways. I was getting sharper. More resilient.

Now? I describe the problem to an AI. It fixes it in seconds.
My productivity has skyrocketed. My output quality is better than ever. But my internal problem-solving muscles are atrophying.

More dependent. Less capable of solving problems from first principles.
My relationship with challenge has fundamentally changed. It's no longer "I need to think harder."
It's "I need a better prompt" or "I should try a different model."

And that scares me.
Because I think struggle is how the brain grows. Facing resistance. Climbing plateaus. Building resilience through friction.

AI removes the friction.

It's like GPS for the mind. You arrive faster, but you no longer understand the terrain.
You never get lost — but if the battery dies, you're helpless.
We're doing this to coding. To writing. To thinking itself.

The Erosion of Resilience

This isn't just about technical skills. It's about resilience.

Resilience isn't innate. It's learned. Forged through struggle. Through failure.
Through pushing past the point where most people quit.

But what happens when AI removes the need to push? I suspect we'll see two classes of creators emerge:

1. 1.
   The Operators: People who rely entirely on AI will produce incredible things — until something breaks that the AI can't fix. Then they'll crumble at the first sign of real resistance.
2. 2.
   The Architects: People who use AI as leverage while still maintaining core skills will dominate. They'll know when to struggle and when to delegate.

The question is: which one will I become?

The New Landscape

2026 is going to be wild.
Because AI doesn't just make you more productive. It makes everyone more productive.
This means an explosion of supply. More apps. More entrepreneurs. More indie hackers. More competition.
The barriers to entry are gone.

Your brilliant idea? Someone else can build it in a week. The moat isn't creation anymore. It's distribution. Attention. Trust. Taste. Speed.

And the web itself isn't ready.
We need new UI primitives. Autocomplete everywhere, not just in specific apps. Voice interfaces that don't feel clunky. Adaptive, generative UIs that assemble themselves in real-time based on what the user needs right now — not static menus designed six months ago.

The Philosophy of the Moment

Here's what I believe:

We're living in the most exciting — and potentially most dangerous — era in human history. It's never been easier to create value. And never harder to stand out.

But the shift in mindset is what matters most. Life doesn't have to be a fight anymore. It can be play. It can be exploration.
But don't mistake possibility for ease. The game has changed, but the game still requires work. Just different work. Faster iteration. Sharper thinking. Relentless experimentation.

The difference is the feeling. Life doesn't have to be a fight anymore. It can be play. Exploration. Discovery.

That's the mindset I'm taking into 2026. Build. Create. Experiment. Integrate AI into everything. But stay sharp. Stay resilient. Don't outsource your brain entirely.

One Last Thing

I want to end with a quote from The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest:

The question for all of us is: what happens when AI removes the mountain?
Do we lose the person we would have become?
Or do we find new mountains to climb?

I don't have the answer yet.
But I'm going to find out.