A Year of Vibes

Armin Ronacher 's Thoughts and Writings blog archive projects travel talks about A Year Of Vibes written on December 22, 2025 2025 draws to a close and it’s been quite a year. Around this time last year, I wrote a post that reflected on my life . Had I written about programming, it might have aged badly, as 2025 has been a year like no other for my profession. 2025 Was Different 2025 was the year of changes. Not only did I leave Sentry and start my new company, it was also the year I stopped programming the way I did before. In June I finally felt confident enough to share that my way of working was different: Where I used to spend most of my time in Cursor, I now mostly use Claude Code, almost entirely hands-off. […] If you would have told me even just six months ago that I’d prefer being an engineering lead to a virtual programmer intern over hitting the keys myself, I would not have believed it. While I set out last year wanting to write more, that desire had nothing to do with agentic coding. Yet I published 36 posts — almost 18% of all posts on this blog since 2007. I also had around a hundred conversations with programmers, founders, and others about AI because I was fired up with curiosity after falling into the agent rabbit hole. 2025 was also a not so great year for the world. To make my peace with it, I started a separate blog to separate out my thoughts from here. The Year Of Agents It started with a growing obsession with Claude Code in April or May, resulting in months of building my own agents and using others’. Social media exploded with opinions on AI: some good, some bad. Now I feel I have found a new stable status quo for how I reason about where we are and where we are going. I’m doubling down on code generation, file systems, programmatic tool invocation via an interpreter glue, and skill-based learning. Basically: what Claude Code innovated is still state of the art for me. That has worked very well over the last few months, and seeing foundation model providers double down on skills reinforces my belief in this approach. I’m still perplexed by how TUIs made such a strong comeback. At the moment I’m using Amp , Claude Code , and Pi , all from the command line. Amp feels like the Apple or Porsche of agentic coding tools, Claude Code is the affordable Volkswagen, and Pi is the Hacker’s Open Source choice for me. They all feel like projects built by people who, like me, use them to an unhealthy degree to build their own products, but with different trade-offs. I continue to be blown away by what LLMs paired with tool execution can do. At the beginning of the year I mostly used them for code generation, but now a big number of...

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