I am excited for the rest of the AI year ahead, which is a year in itself.

Working on an AI tool for the first quarter of the year made me type and dictate a lot in English. Thousands of words every day. And with each day, I am writing lesser code, and micromanaging more. I am glad I decided not to go into a managerial role anytime soon.

One interesting observation is how I have barely written any code this year. I can estimate <1,000 lines by myself? I am including the tab tab tab in Cursor!

Right now, I am working on on-device AI projects, which started as a reason to not pay for the tokens to big corporations but intelligence is slowly getting too cheap to meter.

Then, I worked a bit as an AI engineer, helping the backend <> iOS app with more than a bunch of LLM calls. That one is tricky, understanding how the language model works and squeezing the most out of every token that it spits out.

I have no idea what is going on with the TypeScript errors or the verbose stack trace in Python. Although, I feel the same about Swift concurrency but that's another story.

Fun part is that I *did* vibe-code a lot of it, while keeping security as at-most priority. But, I can definitely say that the process of screaming at a bunch of clankers gets easier if you already have the knowledge about it.

I started by taking ownership of full features in Alex Sidebar by working the backend in Python, and doing the website in TypeScript.

Criteria for judging:
- Understanding the framework's new APIs and accepting the delusion that iOS 26 exists.
- Refactor and build while making the least breaking changes for me to review
- Make the example app more consistent to Apple's HIG