December 2025: Daily Contentment - Bryan's Briefing

Hey friend,
it's the start of a new year. Went to Korea for a week for Christmas. Came back to Osaka to celebrate New Years here. Was surprised to learn that most people in Japan celebrate New Years with their family in quite a chill way. Umeda in Osaka was quite empty, but Namba had some more people, some who also went for a New Year's swim in the little river. No fireworks to be seen though.

I'm not big into New Year's resolutions, but I do like reflecting on things. I achieved my goal of being able to work remotely while abroad, while seeing and experiencing life in various places that I find highly interesting. At the same time, I failed at many things, I wasn't able to generate revenue from any of my personal projects, I didn't make enough progress with any of them, I didn't create as much social media or blog content about my life abroad as I wanted to, I wasn't able to save up any money. But I should still be content with where I'm at currently. And I sometimes forget that frustrations in my life don't come from me not achieving my goals, usually, it's from the way I live my life day to day.

Getting up early in the morning, getting some work done, doing sports / physical activities, meeting people, doing these things instead of waking up late and watching YouTube videos is what makes me feel alive.

It's already January 9th when I publish this post, I usually try to share these right at the beginning of the next month, but often they are not in a state where I want to share them yet, so I keep working on these until I find the right mood to work on them, and bring them to a state where I actually want to share them.

On a different topic, coding with AI is insanely efficient nowadays, but also weird, how software is created has fundamentally changed.

Recently saw this online:

When I was starting out, I remember how obsessed I was with finding out how a command menu was built. A complex, "mysterious" component that took me weeks to build properly, I was so happy.

Now the same result is just one prompt a way.

It’s an exciting time.

On the other hand it makes me a bit sad too. Is everything I’ve been learning about code over the past few years basically worthless now, because Opus 4.5 can do it faster and better?

Getting into a state of deep concentration and continuously solving logic problems is not a requirement anymore for coding, you could just type a quick prompt and come back a few minutes later, not much mental work needed.

But coding and programming experience is still useful, I know what to ask for and evaluate code quality, how to keep things from breaking and scalable, although it's weird how the interaction has changed and how much faster things have become.

Planning on writing some posts about this as well.

🌱 Cool Content I Made

• How to create an app for multiple platforms via Capacitor using SvelteKit
• An introduction to Obsidian

❤️ Cool Stuff By Others

📝 Blog Posts

• Publishing your work increases your luck by Aaron Francis
• Claude Opus 4.5 is a great AI coding agent by Burke Holland - This HackerNews discussion about the article is also interesting.
• Claude Code and What Comes Next by Ethan Mollick