Christmas got a bit busy so I completely forgot about my December update. Let’s summarize the year instead, here are some thoughts from last year.

Highlights

  • Made progress on the “game”. It has been a lot of iteration on the voxel systems, but it’s moving in the right direction. Most fun has been learning more about all the graphics aspects (foliage, lighting, denoising, etc.).
  • zynth was a cool side-project. It actually works and I learned a bunch of stuff: audio, drivers, Wayland, immediate mode GUIs, and more.
  • Went full-time Linux for the desktop at home. Games have always been the big blocker but Valve has solved that for the most part. I still miss the Visual Studio debugger and I guess there are better tools than GDB but it’s enough for now. Looking forward to the RAD Debugger coming to Linux though.
  • Made some very minor open source contributions (zgui, zglfw, zig-vma, simeks-zig). It’s an area where I want to do more, but I tend to focus on contributions that help myself and not doing it just because I can.

AI

I’ve experimented a bit with various AI tools that exist nowadays and here are some brief thoughts:

Auto-complete

This isn’t for me. It just makes me lazy and slow. You do that mental pause to wait for the autocomplete way too often and when I’m at the stage of writing code I tend to already know what to write.

Agents

I’ve tried Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex. Cursor was mostly annoying and it felt like I spent most of my time trying to make it not fail on simple project setup stuff (likely due to my own skill issues). I also really don’t feel like using yet another editor. Claude Code and Codex are more my taste. They are great for quick prototypes but the code quality is lacking. The code it produces tends to have a very limited shelf life and after a point you can’t really iterate on it without too much handholding. Another thing I noticed, if you want to use it in an existing project; you need a critical mass of existing code for it to learn your conventions, but if you have too much it tends to get overwhelmed. For now I might let it prototype but I will likely go in manually and refactor or pick the things I like.

ChatGPT/Claude

Probably what I use the most. It’s great for confirming things you already kinda knew, or to search for literature on topics. It manages to find odd blog posts I would never have found otherwise, and they are usually right on the money. You still need to be wary about what the LLM tells you though. It’s not too uncommon it misinterprets the references it collects.

Month in screenshots

This year I started doing monthly posts where I mainly focus on showing screenshots. This was a great idea and I will definitely continue. It’s a bit difficult when you work on less visual stuff but these posts are a lot quicker to write than technical posts. This is mainly for my own sake anyway.

Billboard grass

Above might be screenshot of the year. Working on the grass was a lot of fun and this part was implemented while visiting Gotland for the summer vacation.

Puzzles

December is nice; not only did I get Advent of Code, but I also saw that FRA posted a puzzle. It was released earlier in the year, but it seems only one person had solved it. I managed to do parts 1-4 without that much of a hassle, but I hit a brick wall on the last part, so I gave up. It sucks, but I have learned a lot about hiding data in a certain medium so I will see that as a win.

I feel puzzles are a great thing. You tend to practice the same part of your brain as with your other projects but the objective is far more concrete. Hopefully you manage to solve it and not only did you learn something but you also got a feeling of success! The danger is of course that you won’t let it go if you ever hit that wall.

Side quests

I also like to get side-tracked and it usually starts with some idea in my head that I can’t let go of, and then it just continues on with me exploring the idea. I learn a lot during these periods and they tend to keep the spark going. Struggling with the same problem for too long isn’t great for motivation. But the rabbit holes are endless so you must be careful to avoid going all the way to writing your own OS…

Motivation

The large boosts of productivity or creativity I get tend to come at a price, and that debt was due in December. You are hyper-focused, the brain is working at 100%, and all of a sudden, all that energy turns against you. It’s like hitting a wall. You question everything and nothing seems fun anymore. I managed to direct my focus on some easy wins at work to keep me going, but even then it’s not a great mental state to be in. Christmas helped a bit with draining that surplus energy, and I can feel my motivation is coming back. I have another week off from work now so that’s a week of doing everything, or nothing. It’s all up to me!

What’s next?

I’m hyped for 2026. I’m a better programmer and problem-solver than a year ago and I hope I’m able to say the same thing next year. I haven’t set any long-term plans for the year but short-term I’m back to voxels so I’m hoping for some cool screenshots next post!