Dear friends,
My wife has a tradition of writing an end of year summary email to all of her friends to help keep in touch with the goings on in everyone’s life (what Facebook was originally supposed to be before it became an entertainment platform). I love reading hers and so I’m going to give it a shot myself this year. Here goes:
In February I left Meta. I woke up early on the morning everyone was supposed to find out, via email, if they got canned. I was anxious. Not of being let go, but scared that I might not be. I breathed a sigh of relief when the email came with my severance letter.
I was unhealthy both physically and mentally. More burned out than I have ever been. Burned out on the entire industry. Still am.
It took me months before I could do anything at a computer again without feeling nauseous. I played video games for months straight, mostly Factorio, until it was nice enough in NY to go outside.
Then the big story of 2025 kicked me out of my funk. I had wanted to play with all the latest AI tools to learn what they could do. I fired up Claude Code and began Vibe Coding some small applications I’ve always wanted. It was a breath of fresh air! You see, I’m only reluctantly a computer programmer.
Agentic coding is the real deal
If you’re like me, then you have a large backlog of ideas you want to try and turn into products. Win-win, learn about AI and get some of my ideas out.
When I started in March, Claude Code was at the level of a Junior Developer which was perfect for me as I’ve been mentoring junior engineers for over 10 years!
I started with a simple problem I had. Some websites don’t allow you to paste into the input fields for some stupid reason. So I created PasteAnyway. It ‘types’ your clipboard into the input often bypassing whatever stupid restrictions the site has put in place to prevent pasting. This lead to a very productive year indeed:
Paste Anyway
- Chrome extension
- ‘Types’ your clipboard into the last input to bypass sites that disable pasting in various ways
WordPress to Threads
- Intelligently break up blog posts into social media posts with links back to the longer text
- Can do a ‘thread’ of replies as well
- Also posts to X if you want
I took my first foray into the Fediverse. I’m pretty over social media. I can feel myself being manipulated when I use these platforms. People I otherwise like in person, I hate online. So I decided to try and make it so I can post to my own platform that I control and have it repost my stuff to help with reach. That’s what this WordPress plugin does.
Threads Automod
- Automated Reply Moderation
- Configurable Moderation Rules
- Reply Audit Dashboard
- Scheduled Posts
- Dashboard with Profile & Post Overview
Like I said, I’m tired of bad behavior online. To the extent the Threads API allows me to do things such as hide rude assholes this is the project that does it. It uses an AI classifier to determine just how rude and if it’s over a certain threshold it issues a command to “Hide Reply for Everyone”. I tested it by posting praise for Tesla, and it worked like a charm. I would have never even seen the rude replies had I not been checking specifically to see what the system was filtering out. It happens so fast that I’m willing to bet NOBODY would see the reply, robbing the sociopaths of their precious likes from the other sociopaths for their weird virtue signaling.
However, Meta’s approval process to use the API for anyone other than yourself is onerous. They have an army of unskilled laborers in other countries trying to enforce complex technical requirements. I eventually gave up so this is only for me even though the intention was to allow brands to auto moderate their social media accounts. Maybe someday I’ll revisit this if I can find someone who specializes in creating videos for Meta’s approval process because honestly I don’t know what they want. I don’t think they do either.
Personal Finance App
- Real-Time Portfolio Dashboard
- Automatic Portfolio Rebalancing with Tax Optimization
- Account Transfer / Tax-Loss Harvesting
- Momentum Trading Scanner
- Gradual House Rebalancing Plan Management
All of my finances in one place. I can now manage everything in a single interface including doing complex rebalancing across different account types so that when I say I want 5% of my total assets to be Reddit stock – a SAT solver figures out which trades need to happen in which accounts (tax advantaged, etc.) to make that happen. It can also rebalance gradually over time. There’s more features, but finance is boring.
SmartThingsHomekitBridge
- Allows you to use Apple’s HomeKit to control Samsung Devices via the Smartthings API
- Custom intelligent control system for Samsung Minisplits to prevent them from doing the batshit crazy things they do out of the box
- Ensures the light is off on the mini-splits even if it gets accidentially turned on
This next project was born out of necessity. I’ll never buy another Samsung product again. I had a Samsung heat pump with 4 mini split heads installed in 2024. THEY DON’T COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER. Meaning you can get them into bad states such as one asking for Heat while another asks for Cooling which is an invalid state and should be handled by the system. It doesn’t, so I had to write my own to coordinate the systems. Also their ‘Auto’ mode for some reason thinks I want the house to be 87 Degrees. No idea why. Utterly broken. Anyway, this is the solution.
Readmebio.com
- Work Style Assessments & Badges – Users can take personality/work style assessments (5 min) and receive results like “Analyzer”, “Driver”, “Collaborator”, or “Innovator” with emoji badges and colors displayed on their profile
- README Templates – Pre-built templates users can choose when creating their profile, filtered by role, making it easy to get started with a professional layout
- Company Directory – Browse coworkers from the same company (based on email domain), see their profiles, job titles, and assessment badges – with search/filter capabilities
- Shareable Links with Expiration – Generate token-based shareable links to profiles with customizable expiration dates, plus share with specific users via email with optional edit permissions
- Profile Photo Upload with Privacy Protection – Upload profile photos with automatic EXIF metadata stripping to protect location and device info, plus auto-orientation correction
- Honorable mentions: Public directory for discovery, profile analytics/view tracking, social OAuth login (LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft), and custom profile slugs for SEO-friendly URLs.
This is actually a rebuild of an older project that was somewhat successful. My wife was a management consultant for a time and she would be shuffled to new projects with new teams constantly often with incredibly tight deadlines. To speed up the “getting to know you and how you work” process, I suggested she created a professional README that just explained all that stuff in plain english. It was actually a bit of a hit at the consulting company. So far it’s the project that has had the most real people sign up and use it without much promotion. I had shut down the old site when I went to Meta no longer having time to maintain it. I was able to recreate it and add nearly the entire backlog of features from the old site in a couple weeks using Claude.
The last three I haven’t previously announced
Jimai (Jimmy!)
- Interactive AI Chat Interface
- Calendar & Schedule Management
- Email Management with Semantic Search
- Day planning assistant
This is my attempt to make a personal assistant that can manage my calendar, email, tasks. It kinda works. It lead me to write TODO (below) so I could have a better API for my tasks.
Podcastify
- Setup simple filters for podcast feeds to filter out unwanted episodes such as sensitive topics or rebroadcasts
- Use AI to transcribe podcasts
- Use AI to detect where the commercials are
This is my most ambitious use of AI yet. I LOVE podcasts, but there are a few things I find annoying. I almost never want to listen to old episodes, but certain shows repost all the time. Thankfully they usually include some text indicating it’s a repost, and this will allow me to filter them out of my feed.
I use this to subscribe to their feed, then I subscribe my podcast player to this and I only get the new episodes.
It’s also useful when podcasts try and put other shows in the same feed that I don’t care about such as Gabfest Reads – a sister show to the Slate Political Gabfest that I just don’t have much interest in. Now MY feed is just the Political Gabfest.
Next I’m going try and give it some more global intelligence – every now and then there’s a big news story like the US Invading Venezuela. I don’t need 25 takes on the same topic.. I’m going to see if AI can find the best ones and just put those in the feed for me automatically. We’ll see.
TODO
- Best Kanban board anywhere!
- Multiple repeat types including ‘When finished’ (think medicine, every 6 hours from the time you took it)
- Multiple notification kinds including annoying (remind me every 5 min until it’s done) for time sensitive reminders
- Full API for managing todos and Kanban state
- CLI tool for easy integration with Claude Code
- AI Integration to help you break down cards, summarize progress, find the right priority order, etc.
This last one is near and dear to my heart. It’s the program I’ve been working on the most over the last month. There’s always been something a little off/wrong with every todo app. Omnifocus, Reminders, Todoist, etc. are all missing some major function such as an API, or a reminder type.
The color pallet and typography are meant to be relaxing and they are to me.
Almost all “Kanban” virtual boards I’ve seen from Trello to some internal tools don’t actually implement Kanban. They think it’s just columns, but that’s not enough to use Kanban for work management.
Here we see most of the functionality that’s missing from other virtual collaborative kanban boards:
- Done rules
- Work in Progress (WIP) limits
- Blocked section
The struggle I’ve had, especially with a remote team, is bootstrapping them into the process. Especially with Junior team members they don’t yet have a shared definition of Done – this kanban board allows you to set arbitrary “Done Rules” which are the definition of done for that step in the process.
Work in progress limits are the entire point of Kanban, to limit rapid context switching by ensuring work is completed before other work is started.
People often ask what they should do when they’re waiting for something, like a return email or another team to implement a feature? The WIP limits prevent them from picking up another card. That’s where the Blocked sub-column comes in. Cards there don’t count towards the WIP limit. Blocked is per-column so you don’t lose your place of where the card was left off.
To help out, there’s also an AI integration where you can ask questions about tasks in the columns such as “What’s over due?” Have the AI break down cards into sub-tasks.
Here we see the AI summarizing everything that has been deployed making it easy to report team progress!
There’s still plenty of UI/UX work to do, so I’ll continue plugging away but I think it’s ready for early adopters to give it a shot!
How did 1 person do all of this?
Berkley released a paper estimating that AI agent capabilities are doubling every 8 months. Sure enough, there have been two Claude releases since I stated using it, and it’s gone from passable but not great to I don’t even read the code anymore. In 8 months. The estimates that Software Engineering would be a solved problem by 2027 appear to be on track.
We can see the increase in my github activity roughly correlating to the capabilities of the releases.
I ran for the Penn South board of Directors and lost by 10 votes. Even at this level of politics the amount of deceit is crazy. I was advised to photoshop photos of my family so they didn’t look like I was in another house, for example. wtf?
In October I had a major tech outage as I tried to upgrade my NAS storage capacity and made a fatal mistake. That’s why my blog no longer has any images :(. My backup strategy failed because Synology moves things around every release and when you’re picking and choosing what to backup it means stuff gets lost. Luckily none of our family photos got lost, but a lot of our scanned houshold paperwork did. Since then I’ve developed a different backup strategy.
Claude has also managed to help me improve a lot of my terraform files and configurations implementing things I’ve always wanted to but never had the time to research myself.
Among my non-technical accomplishments this year, my wife and I built a shed! Just as we were putting the last thing on (the roof) I fell off the ladder onto the pavement and broke my arm which made the last few months of the year a bit annoying but I’m almost completely healed now in all ways.
Ready for what 2026 has in store!
