back at it

Happy new year, dear friends.

It’s sweet to think about this small phrase and how it’s made almost entirely of promises—about what we’ve returned to, and what we’re finally willing to stay with. A beautiful, complimentary greeting, but also a gentle wager that something carried over is worth continuing. A new year.

I’m back at my desk with excitement, in that familiar posture that feels like gearing up for a start. The break helped, but not in the way rest is usually advertised. It didn’t reset me. It just reminded me of what I’m drawn to when the noise fades.

This year, my focus is on depth.

I’m moving past the initial romance of Large Language Models—the awe, the demos—and into the rigorous architecture of implementation in my work and other practices. This means less spectacle, but more structure around my reading and experiments. My roadmap is cluttered, but clear: persisting memory in applied AI applications, context management, retrieval systems that don’t feel brittle, interfaces that respect the user instead of overwhelming them. The unglamorous work. Stuff that holds.

I also want to stay longer with my commitments this year. To narrow my energy around a few things and resist the urge to constantly start anew just because starting feels good.

This same instinct applies to the products I’m building.

I’m committing to Incinote—not just as a side project, but as something I’m willing to watch grow. That means staying long enough to see what works, to gather feedback, to notice user excitement, and more importantly, their complaints. I believe a product works when it successfully removes a bottleneck, and Incinote was built for this—helping people evaluate jobs and opportunities and prepare for applications and interviews.

Commercializing it will involve marketing, distribution, and asking people to pay—things I instinctively flinch from. I’m introverted, deeply so. Charging for things still makes me uncomfortable. There’s a part of me that wants the work to speak and the gratification to quietly follow. But products don’t work like that. At least not the ones that survive.

So I’m learning to sit with the awkwardness and treat it as part of the work. If the product is thoughtful, useful, and honest, then asking for value isn’t greed—it’s alignment. I believe this.

This year isn’t about doing more. It’s about choosing fewer things and staying.