Another year. Let's do this. THE GOOD AI coding tools went from "cute toy" to "I genuinely cannot imagine working without this." Claude Code became my pair programmer. Not in the fake marketing way where an AI writes a fizzbuzz and people clap. In the real way where I describe a complex migration across 42 NestJS modules and it does 80% of the work correctly. The remaining 20% is where my brain still matters, and honestly, that's the fun part. TOPO Contabil grew from an ambitious project to a real platform. 42 modules. 252 use cases. Actual clients using it to manage actual money. The Brazilian tax system is still insane, but our software makes it LESS insane, and that feels meaningful. Yooga had a strong year. The POS system keeps evolving, restaurants keep signing up, and our payment processing keeps improving. Being a Tech Lead at a company that's actually growing and profitable is a rare and wonderful thing. The M4 Max MacBook changed my relationship with my tools. It sounds dramatic but when your machine stops being a constraint, you work differently. More experiments, faster iterations, less waiting. It's the first computer I've had where I never think about the hardware. Sigil Protocol took shape. AI agent identity is going to matter more and more as agents become autonomous. We're early, but the foundation is solid. FlowForm proved that LLM-powered conversational forms can be better than traditional ones. Not just different. BETTER. Users complete them at higher rates because talking is more natural than filling boxes. THE BAD AI hype reached truly unbearable levels. Every startup became an "AI company." Every feature became "AI-powered." Your company added a ChatGPT wrapper and called it innovation. The VC money flowed like water toward anything with "AI" in the pitch deck, regardless of whether the product made any sense. The job market stayed weird. Companies laying off engineers while claiming they can't find talent. Senior roles demanding 15 technologies. Junior roles requiring 3 years of experience. The whole thing is broken and nobody is fixing it because it's cheaper to complain on LinkedIn than to actually hire and train people. Open source sustainability is still a joke. The most critical infrastructure on the internet is maintained by exhausted volunteers while billion-dollar companies use it for free and send stickers as thanks. We haven't fixed this. We're not going to fix this. THE HALLUCINATED LinkedIn became truly unhinged. Every post is either "I was FIRED and here's why that's the BEST thing that ever happened to me" or "I gave my employees UNLIMITED vacation and our revenue TRIPLED." Nobody tells the truth on LinkedIn. It's a platform of performed success. AI-generated content flooded every platform. Blog posts that say nothing in 2000 words. Twitter threads that are clearly GPT-4 with a personality prompt. Comment sections full of "Great insight! I particularly agree with your point about..." which is 100% generated because no human talks like that. "AI will replace developers" articles were written every single week by people who have never written a line of code. AI will not replace developers. AI replaces TASKS. The developers who learn to use AI tools will replace the developers who don't. That's been true of every tool since the invention of the compiler. THE PERSONAL I shipped more this year than any year before. The combination of Claude Code, the M4 Max, and accumulated architectural knowledge meant I could move faster without cutting corners. Quality went up AND speed went up. That's rare. I got better at saying no. No to features that don't matter. No to meetings that could be messages. No to refactors that feel good but don't help users. This is maybe the most important skill a tech lead can develop. I wrote on this blog. Consistently. The dev who builds a blog and actually uses it. The prophecy is fulfilled. 2025 was good. Not perfect, but good. The work was meaningful, the tools were better, and the code shipped. Let's see what 2026 breaks.