cat articles/furikaeri-2025
Looking Back on 2025
Our child was born. People often say that the birth of a child is the biggest change in life, and now that I am living through it, I think that is exactly right.
Life
Child
Our child was born. People often say that the birth of a child is the biggest change in life, and now that I am living through it, I think that is exactly right. My way of thinking has shifted so that everything starts from the child. Also, the child is cute. Very cute. I feel fortunate to be able to raise a child. Working remotely also means I can see the child's face often, which I am grateful for.
Before the birth, my wife became unwell because of a chronic condition and was hospitalized for a long period. Even after the birth, we were quite anxious about how things would go. Fortunately, her recovery has been good, and she is now able to live daily life without problems. Health is something to be grateful for. I am mostly fine too, apart from frozen shoulder.
House
The house we built last year, and started living in at the end of last year, is very comfortable. Winter is reasonably cold, and because the area around us is farmland, there are many insects in summer. Even with those tradeoffs, it is very easy to live here. Now that our family has grown, I am glad we built it.
Car
We welcomed a Tesla Model Y Juniper Long Range. The comfort of a BEV without an engine, quietness and quick acceleration, is good in itself, but the software and UX are also very well made. Most cars extend the UX of past cars, but a newer company does not need to inherit all of that history, so it can design a different experience. I feel that clearly. Car travel, which is almost all travel in the countryside, has become much easier and more comfortable.
The current Autopilot driver assistance is already quite comfortable, and I expect FSD, or practically speaking a good automated driving assistance system, will become available in Japan in the future. I am looking forward to that too.
Technology
I continued working mainly around information retrieval, along with various technical work and product development. This was the year coding agents rose quickly, and almost all of my technical work is now helped by AI. The number of available moves has increased, and I feel the range of what I can do has expanded significantly. This is not limited to ordinary software development. For example, in information retrieval model development, AI can handle a large part of the work. Tasks that previously required too much manual effort can now often be approached in a more experimental way, which is very useful.
I think it is important, especially when the right product direction is unclear, to work on technical areas that AI cannot or does not easily replace. I have been able to work on those technical areas, so it has been enjoyable. Of course, I may be biased, and some of those areas may turn out to be replaced more easily than I expect.
At work, the AI product I had mainly been building was released, and it seems to have received a certain level of recognition both inside the company and in the broader market. I am grateful for that. It was also the result of a team environment that made development easy, so thank you to everyone involved. Next year I want to keep relying heavily on the team and on AI, while continuing technical work and building new products.
A lot happened in 2025, but the main event was that our child was born. As always, I am grateful to my wife, who supports me in many ways. With that, I hope to see you all in 2026.
