As is tradition now, how did I do with my forecasts and commitments for 2025?
Forecasts
I did good here, which is easy to do when your forecasts aren’t very bold.
We’re going to hear the word “agent” a whole lot this year—just about as much as we’ll continue to hear “AI” uttered.
✅ True, agentic features were part of major announcements from OpenAI, Anthropic and others throughout the year. Not only did companies launch agentic features but many also worked to increase the amount of time their agents can work without intervention.
While the tech won’t be there to deliver, the vision of fully-customized-to-you entertainment will enter the zeitgeist. What could be more compelling than to tell a prompt the exact type of movie you want to watch or game you want to play?
✅ True, and the Sora app is the best example of this. I was surprised to see it come from OpenAI but not at all surprised at how much the average person seemed to enjoy using it.
AR/XR/MR glasses combined with capable multi-modal LLM-based assistants will start to feel like the inevitable Next Big Thing. We should even see upgraded hardware from Meta and at least another tease from Google.
✅ True, Meta’s Ray-Ban Display is the biggest mainstream AR/XR/MR swing. The Android XR platform looks compelling, as well. Google’s demos felt to me like I was getting a glimpse of a realistic, not so distant future. Even Apple has pivoted its Vision-related efforts so they can chase Meta rather than continue to innovate in the direction they committed to with Vision Pro. These devices aren’t yet essential for consumers but consumer electronics companies are already making room in their product offerings for them.
Apple will fail to save face and continue to appear as behind the curve as they are on buzzy AI-branded products.
✅ True. Siri is still woefully behind the competition and Apple doesn’t have any other major product or service that puts points on the board for them with AI.
If real, the iPhone 17 “Air” will not outsell either iPhone 17 Pro model.
✅ True, and I wasn’t bold enough. The Air seems to have been the worst selling iPhone model for 2025.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s “friendship” won’t make it through 2025.
✅ True, and the crash out happened in real time on X, of course.
Commitments
I was too ambitious again. You know what they say about repeating the same actions and expecting a different result.
Draft a novel. Why not? I think I can put 400ish pages of coherent fiction together. If I can’t, I’d like to know why.
❌ This is the first year I did not complete my Big Goal. I haven’t specified it in previous yearly commitment posts but one of them is always a big, must do item. I change my life to best support that goal and reduce as much friction around making it happen as possible. Given that context, it was a huge disappointment to miss this one. By calling this one a failure in August I also destabilized all the routines/habits I had that were built around writing for the novel. In the end, I wrote ~65,000 words (>200 pages). A more thorough deep dive into the novel writing process is coming—something like 339 Hours Later was for my first year of piano practice.
Continue learning piano. I played 338 hours and 50 minutes in 2024. I won’t push as hard this year (I’m writing a novel, didn’t you hear?) but I’d be surprised if I didn’t add at least another 200 hours to my tally.
✅ Yes, but I “only” practiced for 118 hours. That amounts to twenty minutes per day.
Create 12 musical loops. Producing music of some kind is a long term goal I attached to learning piano so I might as well get started.
✅ I’m surprised to say I did this. Loops turned out to be pretty straightforward to make and so doing this never felt like work, which is great. For the most part the loops aren’t that good but making them helped me learn quite a bit about the music hardware and software I have. It also helped me apply some of the music theory knowledge I’ve picked up over the last couple of years. I’ll put those loops somewhere public and link to them when that’s done.
Sell a product. I’ve never produced a good that can be purchased. I’m curious what people would pay me for.
❌ Nope. This one was a moonshot but I thought maybe I’d find a way to surprise myself. I didn’t even have a product in mind to sell when I wrote this goal. Tales has become the biggest contender for that but I’ve learned enough lessons in ’25 to resist adding that goal to 2026.
Read at least 12 books. Easiest one on the list.
✅ I read 14, which is less than I expected. It was the second year in a row at least one book on my list was written by someone I know, which is still very cool to be able to say.
Consumption
Finish The Wire
❌ I didn’t watch a single second of The Wire in 2025.
Watch Season 2 of Severance
❌ I didn’t watch a single second of Severance in 2025.
Read Nexus, Flow
❌ ❌ I didn’t read either. My reading in 2025 was much more in service of my writing, so those books didn’t stand much of a chance. I’ll get to them but probably not this year, either.
Finish Silent Hill 2, Baldur’s Gate 3
✅ ❌ I finished Silent Hill 2! I did one of these things! Reviewed it on the game review site, too; it was excellent. It’s one of very few video games I finished this year. Baldur’s Gate 3 remains on my list along with all the other Game of the Year winners I keep missing.
Extracurriculars
I refreshed the whatbrentsay home page. I’m pleased with the design and how faithfully I was able to reproduce it. There’s still UX friction on the index page (ex: no pagination) but I’ll continue to optimize it. Almost no one visits this site so impact is low.
I published a surprise feature to act as a tracker for my novel writing progress—a little embarrassing to see that estimated done date.
I launched a social writing app called reproze. It’s based on an idea I’ve had for around a decade and it felt great to get it out of my system after all this time. It deserves its own feature so I can indulge in its details.
I bought a bookcase (finally) and filled it up immediately after putting it together (of course). It was a trip pulling books out of boxes I haven’t touched in 20+ years.
I built a high end PC not too long before the great memory apocalypse. It’s been a source of ironic humor for me because much of what I’ve used it for hasn’t required the power it has. She’s a beaut though.
I bought a few pieces of small music hardware to practice music production and sound design without using a computer. I’m not anywhere near good at synthesis or sampling but now I’m familiar with both which is more than I could say at any previous point in time.
I also converted a TrimUI Brick into a poor man’s DirtyWave M8. The tracker workflow seems unintuitive at first but it’s a clever way to make music.
Last word(s)
2025 was a year. It was trying, all around. Personally, professionally, socially, politically, existentially—you name it. Abandoning the novel draft put an even bigger damper on the back half so it’s hard for me to look back with anything less than disappointment. When I consider how I responded to the failure, the feeling compounds. There’s a lot for me to learn and correct from that.
Maybe that’s the best lesson to take from 2025. I learned a lot—about music, writing, myself. That’s counts for something. We are our greatest projects and we are never complete. “Done” is the best we get and that’s only because our ability to continue the work ends at some point.