2026.01.04

CXXXIII

[The Next Episode; Highlight Reel; Less Exploring, More Exploiting; Poetic Guidelines; Don't Stop Learning; 2026]

Thesis: A review of 2025 & some of the thoughts I’m taking with me to help accomplish my goals in 2026.

[The Next Episode]

2025 was an impactful year for me, and I know that Jack & I have a solid foundation which we can use to make BirdDog truly life changing.

In all honesty, I've never been more excited for a year in my life.

Our vision is solidified; while there’s still a lot of uncertainty to deal with, the future continues to become less about invention and more about execution.

In this less continuous post, I mention some highlights from 2025, BirdDog’s state at the start of 2026, some beliefs & aphorisms I’m taking with me into 2026… and a reminder that it’s not too late to learn things.

[Highlight Reel]

Here are some adventures & achievements from 2025 that I'm grateful to have been able to experience:

• Turned BirdDog into a business that can support myself

• Moved back into C House & met amazing new people

• Spent quality time with my best friends

• Visited SF Parc & Aevitas in SF

• Naturally cured myself of "sinusitis" that according to a doctor required surgery

• Learned to ski enough to go down a blue diamond in one day on a boy's trip

• Went to 2 high school friends’ weddings

• Won more business in one year than I ever have in my entire life

• Did over 35,000 push ups

• Ate at Madras Dosa another > 20 times (too few, in all honesty, but Wusong has gotten in the rotation)

• Crossed 10k followers on LinkedIn

• Saw myself in the final cut of the vampire movie I acted in 2 years ago

• Went to a reunion with some of my senior year roommates on a lake in PA

• Continued to write 1 blog post per week & crossed 2 years at it & 130 total posts

[Less Exploring, More Exploiting]

A lot has been falling into place for BirdDog in the last couple of months.

Between crossing some revenue thresholds, releasing a very powerful case study, and securing some quite meaningful partnerships, we have a lot of validation that we're going further down the right track.

I still won't ring the bell saying we have PMF yet, but we've gotten close enough to it & are confident that at our current price point we're providing a high enough ROI for our clients that we're going to be focused much more aggressively on scaling through 2026.

While we have high revenue targets, this is the first time I've ever looked at a financial model this extreme and thought, "Yeah, those assumptions are reasonable." And, if we hit the targets, I think ipso facto we have PMF.

The feeling I wrote about in August of having derisked the business in a lot of ways has gotten significantly stronger; it’s continuing to become much less about exploring & finding what might work and much more about exploiting the current thing that does work.*

_{*If you don’t love my use of the word exploit… well, it’s a technical term}

[Poetic Guidelines]

I wrote a couple of outlooks for 2026 about LLMs & social media & surveillance states & the death of free will and all that, but I think a much more compelling and impactful piece is the below aphorisms & rules that either helped me in 2025 or I wish I thought more about last year.

A few of them are mine, some of them are from famous people, some of them are too generic to attribute. All of them will be going with me into 2026:

• 5 minutes of reading is worth more than 5 minutes (or 5 hours) of doom scrolling

• Spending 3 hours in deep work each day will be 3 of your most fulfilling hours

• Every repetition you have an LLM do for you is a lost opportunity to get better at the skill

• Walking to dinner with a friend (or friends) is a luxury to be cherished

• Don't forget to go adventures

• Even trying a new skill is an adventure

• Read old books & watch old movies

• Your days feel longer and more interesting when you focus intensely on one thing at a time

• Multi tasking is not doing two things at 50% capacity each, it's doing two things at 25% capacity each

• 60 minutes of deep work and a 10 minute break is worth at least 2 or 3x more than 60 minutes of distracted work

• A 10 minute run is better than a 0 minute run

• You can only have one priority

• Every time you say no to a distraction when focusing, you make your focus stronger

• Even if you think it might not be a distraction, it's probably a distraction

• If you engage with two excuses in a row, you know that now you're just looking for excuses

• Don't waste time negotiating with yourself—do the thing

• Find outlets to stay grounded, like journaling every night or doing 100 pushups a day; you'll ultimately go further faster

Shoot me an email if you have anything I should add to the list...

[Don't Stop Learning]

A reminder to keep learning, even if ‘they’ tell you it’s too late.

A lot of people in 2025 claimed that you should learn how to use LLMs & agents instead of learning skills like coding, writing, design, or any non physical thing. Some people even claimed skills like selling should be taken over by AI.

I ignored this “advice” and invested a LOT in continuing to learn and refine skills like coding & sales, and I'm very glad that I did. Those two things were critical to my contribution to accomplishing what we did with BirdDog.

So, going into 2026, I’m particularly concerned that this narrative has so much staying power for 2 reasons:

1. I know firsthand how much better you can get at something by actually doing the thing instead of relying on AI entirely to do it for you

2. I’ve seen very bright people become afraid to invest in skills because of the narrative that AI will obsolesce them all in 6 months

Remember, me speaking out against this narrative is not some grizzled 10 year programmer afraid of losing his job. I'm the dude who took Adderall &* talked to an LLM for 3 days in 2022 to teach himself enough Python to deliver a final project for a class I didn't go to that wasn’t even taught in Python. In 2024, I wrote about using LLMs to write code in 3 programming languages I didn’t know. Even then, though, the goal was always learning.

Learning is how you make yourself more powerful. Don't let someone convince you that you just need to pay them $200 a month for the rest of your life instead of learning anything ever agian.

Briefly, here are some arguments for vibe coding along with counter arguments. I chose vibe coding because it’s the poster child for people saying “you don’t need to learn x anymore”, but I’m sure the arguments can be generalized or mapped to other domains as well.

1. LLM autocomplete is faster: Autocomplete lets the LLM starts driving & you start editing, which puts pressure on your code to be no better than average LLM quality. An LSP + VIM motions should accomplish the same speed boost with greater accuracy.

2. LLMs are great at boiler plate code: This in one of my most frequent uses of LLMs, but a lot of the time it's still more efficient to a) use VIM motions to rapidly copy & mutate boiler plate code b) build a code base that doesn't need much boiler plate code. In other words, if you need an LLM to write boiler plate code for you, the real problem might be that you need boiler plate code in the first place.

3. LLMs are great at answering questions I don't know the answer to: My favorite use of LLMs, especially around syntax. That being said, if you catch yourself asking it the same question more than 5 times, you might not be paying enough attention to actually learn the thing…

4. LLMs let you operate at a higher level of abstraction / English is the new programming language: Every time you go up another level of abstraction, you don't know what you're missing one layer down; the trade offs someone else made could be costing you dearly overtime. Awareness of these tradeoffs & alpha comes from going down the ladder of abstraction.

In short, please do not give up or lose hope about learning things just because the LLM & agent hype bros and marketers are shouting from the roof that we’re at the end of history. It’s never as cut and dry as they’re making it out to be—keep going.

_{*Crossing something out means it was a joke ;)}

If you enjoyed this post & want to follow along on my & BirdDog’s journey through 2026, please subscribe!

[2026]

Cheer's to everything you did in 2025 that you're proud of and every little moment that made it meaningful.

I’m very excited for what the future holds, and am filled with vigor to engage with it.

And, when that vigor wears off, what will be left beneath it will be an unflinching & unwavering commitment to continue on the mission.

Live Deeply,