Nothing happened that I'd call a huge event, but I still went through a fair amount of ups and downs. The way I approach development has changed quite a bit, too. If I don't write it down, I'm afraid even I will forget those moments, so here goes.
2025 felt like it went by much faster than 2024. I remember hearing somewhere that the length of time we feel is determined relative to the total span of our lives so far. For example, for a 5-year-old, one year is 20% of their life, so time is very dense, but for me in my 30s, one year is only 3.3% of my life, so time is less dense. The brain supposedly processes familiar, repeated things as shorter. It's amazing how well-optimized that is.
In the first half of 2025, there were quite a lot of changes to the team's makeup. The team lead and the senior developers who had made up the team left, and the team was reorganized around teammates with a similar level of experience to mine. We still haven't filled the gap they left. Come to think of it, the team has changed every single year. I joined in November 2023, and I've somehow become the longest-tenured person on the team.
Change felt like a typhoon, but then at some point it went calm like the eye of the storm, so I focused as much as I could on my own work and on adapting to the changes. Here's what I was in charge of:
- Portfolio project
- Improving the forced SSR structure
- Monorepo improvements and adopting Turborepo
- Building the foundation of a design system
Items 3 and 4 are still in progress, so I'll write about them on the blog once they're done.
The portfolio project was largely driven by requirements handed down from the business unit, but I still led each of these tasks as much as I could on my own. Most of them started from questions like "Why does it work this way? Why are we writing it like this?" Through questions like these, I found the root causes of problems and moved things forward by sharing solutions with my teammates.
I added a new domain to the service, and I also worked on improving the design of existing code to make the developer experience better. I was glad to be able to contribute to the project through more than just building service features. Looking back on the process, I was reminded once again that I'm someone who loves the path that starts with a question and leads to a solution.
Adding up the time I spent learning to code and the time I've actually worked as a developer, it's been about 4 years. Maybe because I've gotten pretty used to the work, I felt like my interest had dropped a bit compared to before. Maybe it's because the density of time has gone down, or maybe it's because I keep doing the work in much the same way every time. Or maybe the arrival of AI agents has made development less fun? Perhaps I've lost my initial passion, or perhaps I'm just complaining from a place of comfort.
I wondered whether anyone besides me felt this way, and when I looked around, I found a Reddit thread with a fairly similar sentiment. There was one reply I liked: like everything else in life, you have to be willing to turn what was once overwhelming into something mundane in order to move forward. (There was also a reply asking who forced you to use AI.)
Reading that reply, I got a rough idea of why I'd lost interest. All those implementations and the processes behind them that overwhelmed me when I first encountered development. Those things were mountains I had to climb back then, but maybe now is the time to delegate them to AI and make them mundane?
Still, I feel like I'm lingering somewhere on that boundary. I can't bring myself to treat the sense of accomplishment I used to get from implementing things myself as something fine to hand over to AI. I want the convenience of AI, yet part of me feels like it's an intruder stealing my joy, which is completely contradictory.
I think the slight boredom and stagnation I feel now is part of the process of moving on to the next stage. In the past, just getting a single button onto the screen and hooking up data was overwhelming, but now that's an area AI can handle just fine. It's even faster at it than I am. I still love typing code myself, but instead of feeling deflated that this joy has been taken from me, I should think about where to spend the extra capacity I've gained.
In 2026, I want to find the fun in development at a deeper level than just building features: the essence of the product, business value, and the user experience. I also want to step outside the frame of "work" and take on projects powered solely by my own creativity, so I can face new territory. I hope this will be a year where I can create things I truly love.
Anyway, let's do our best in 2026.
