Surviving the Half-Baked AI Hype

March 1, 2026 AI No comments

I was looking at my social feeds recently, and it feels like everyone is suddenly an AI productivity guru or all knowledgeable about AI (ironically I write about AI a lot as well). People are just throwing together these half-baked agents and AI solutions, not even checking if they solve a real problem or if any quality is there, and bragging about inventing some “10x workflow”. Well, not really bragging themselves, but rather asking AI to brag about it, which makes it even worse.

I believe this year is just so much FOMO and oversaturation fatigue for all of us, software engineers. I no longer know where it is worth spending my time. Last weekend I spent some time setting up OpenClaw because that seems to be a hot thing right now. Before that I was vibe coding different things, playing with LLM integrations, Agents, tools or whatever the latest cool thing was. You can spend lots of time learning a tool or an approach, and a month or two later, it’s completely obsolete because the next “best thing” just dropped. It’s overwhelming. For the most part, it is all just noise. It is increasingly more and more difficult to figure out what the signal is. The signal-to-noise ratio just went really really bad. These days whenever I see a post by someone I try to quickly gauge if that is typical AI text and I mostly ignore it in those cases, if not, I try to see if there is some substance to whatever is written and if there are any opinions expressed, if so, that seems to be a genuine piece of work and it draws my attention. I am starting to develop an allergy to AI generated text.

I am not an AI denier. It is extremely useful and great but the hype is just over the board. What goes up will inevitably settle down, and we just need to figure out how to ride the waves. I’ve written about this in the past. The tools will inevitably change but the underlying shift in our industry is permanent. Our software engineering jobs are destined to change. There is no question about that. There is also a lot of uncertainty over which other jobs will be displaced by AI. With the current trends, it looks like anything that has to do with text and image processing can be replaced and anything that has anything to do with operating in the physical world (think plumbing) or requiring human judgment might take longer to get replaced. I spoke to some of my non-tech friends and they express fear of being affected by AI as well.

All I can say for now is that we need to keep adapting to remain relevant. So while I don’t like all of the hype, if I don’t sample around, try things out I might miss on one of the things that wasn’t a hype and be left behind as the industry moves forward.


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My 1-Hour Open Claw Setup: Docker, Llama 3.1, and Telegram

February 22, 2026 AI, AI Agent, HowTo No comments

I saw all the fuss about Open Claw online and then spoke to a colleague and she was saying she is buying a Mac mini to run Open Claw locally. I could not resist the temptation to give it a try and see how far I can get. This post is just a quick documenting what I was able to do in like one hour of setup.

If you’re like me and find it difficult to follow all the latest AI hype and missed it, Open Claw is an open-source AI agent framework that connects large language models directly to your local machine, allowing them to execute commands and automate workflows right from your terminal or your phone.

A quick preview below. This is just nuts. In one hour I was able to run OpenClaw on Docker talking to llama3.1 running locally and communicating with this via Telegram bot from my phone 🤯.

Back in the old days I would open some kind of documentation and follow steps one by one and unquestionably get stuck somewhere. This time I started with Gemini chat prompting it to guide me through the installation and configuration process. This proved to be the best and quickest way.

Decision 1: Running locally or in some isolation.

I think this one is an obvious choice. Giving hallucinating LLMs permission to modify files on my primary laptop sounds like a recipe for disaster. Decided to go with Docker container but if I find the right workflows I might buy Mac mini as well. 

Commands were fairly simple, something along these lines:

git clone https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw.git
cd openclaw
./docker-setup.sh
docker compose up -d openclaw-gateway

Decision 2: Local LLM or Connect to something (Gemini, OpenAI)

This is a more difficult decision to make. Even though I’m running an M4 with 32GB, I cannot run too large of a model. From reading online it is obvious that connecting to large LLMs has an advantage of not hallucinating and giving best results but at the same time you’ve got to share your info with it and run the risk of running into huge bills on token usage. Since this was purely for my self learning and I don’t yet have good workflows to run, I just decided to connect using a small model llama.3.1 running via Ollama. Since it was running on my local machine and not docker, I had to play a bit with configuration files but it worked just fine. And yeah, the answers I would get are really silly.

Later I found that ClawRouter is the best path forward. Basically you use a combination of locally run LLM and large LLMs you connect to. I might do this in the next iteration.

Decision 3: Skills, Tools, Workflows

This is just insane how many things are available. Because this can run any bash (yeah, in your telegram you can say “/bash rm x.files” – scary as hell) on the local the capabilities for automation with LLMs are almost limitless.

Conclusion

I can barely keep up with all of the innovations that are happening in the AI space but they are awesome and I’m inspired by the people who build them and feel like I want to vibe code so much more instead of spending my time filling-in my complex cross-border tax forms over the weekend.


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From Alien Translators to Human Translators

February 15, 2026 AI, Opinion No comments

Just wanted to share some quick thoughts on AI again. It does change our jobs (see my earlier thoughts “AI is asteroid and your tech job is a dino”, “Is AI redefining software craftsmanship?”). It completely rewrites how much can be done in a short period of time (see a bunch of vibe coding posts from me: blogger agent, typing game, AI powered snake, etc). And while I expressed some doubts and expected a ceiling to its advancements, I am now more deeply convinced that the time to fully embrace AI is now. Almost any knowledge work you do with your brain can get some help from AI. And while I advocate for limited use of AI in writing (“Don’t outsource your thinking to AI”) it has undeniably changed how I do my writing and what value I think I bring or don’t bring. Writing generic advice, anything that can be searched online, is an absolute waste of time, unless it is supplemented with opinions or experiences. Writing coding blog posts with technical details, as I used to do in the past, is also worthless. The entire stack overflow is now not receiving much traffic.

I liked to think about Software Engineers as these super smart almost alien-like translators. We used to translate requirements and business needs into cryptic code that most people couldn’t understand, just to make the software work. While fundamental knowledge is still relevant and our role as translators still remains, the destination language is changing to be more English-like. Instead of typing code we orchestrate AI work. What still matters is what AI cannot do and is very unlikely to be able to do soon, which is doing human things. The things that revolve around judgment, our lived experience, and our authentic connections.

An LLM can write technical documentation, generate a summary, and write lots of code. It works perfectly for transfer of knowledge, but it still is not good at transfer of experience and understanding what we really need and mean as humans. Translators are still needed, but instead of being more alien-like we might need to be more human-like and do more human things.

P.S. I resisted the urge to use AI for this blog post.


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Built a personal “AI Slop” Generator in 3 Hours

February 8, 2026 AI, Opinion No comments

Presenting you with AI Slop by Andriy Buday and Gemini: https://aislop.andriybuday.com 

I was recently challenged on why my weekly blog posts are not written by AI. I do have my strong opinions on this and arguments against it but before I delve into them I wanted to accept the challenge. So in about 3 hours of vibe coding I built an automated GitHub and Google Gemini powered workflow that picks either an idea from ideas.md file or one of my older blog posts on this website and (re-)writes a new blog post based on that and then uploads it to my dedicated aislop subdomain.

Solution based on GitHub Actions, FTP, Google Gemini

The entire project took about 3 hours from initial concept to deployment. This was pure vibe coding of ~40 git commits, a bit of setup in my bluehost, and some setup on github.

I learned about GitHub Actions fairly recently, but basically you can build a workflow based on yaml definition that would be triggered on a periodic basis. Additionally you can put your secrets into GitHub repo configuration. I placed my Gemini API key into secrets as well as I then placed my FTP access details (yes, I know it’s insecure and old school, but this is a 3-hour hack project). For FTP I created a dedicated account and only allowed a specific folder on my bluehost, where I also created a subdomain.

How it works: The workflow and Tech Specs

I asked Claude to summarize the technical details because this is what AI shines at:

Workflow:

  • GitHub Actions → triggers workflow daily → Python script picks unprocessed blog post or idea from ideas_tracking.json or blog_posts.json → load content and prompt Gemini via API with custom prompt → postprocess text to HTML → create HTML file and update blog_posts.json (database) → connect to FTP and upload files → git push changes for tracking and backup

Core Development Phases

  • Scaffolding & Engine (75m): Establishing the repository and building the Python script to handle web scraping via BeautifulSoup4 and AI integration.
  • Automation & Queueing (35m): Configuring GitHub Actions for CI/CD and implementing a JSON-based status tracker to manage 370+ URLs.
  • Refinement & UI (80m): Enhancing Gemini’s prompting for authoritative content, fixing Markdown-to-HTML rendering bugs, and building a responsive progress dashboard.

Technical Stack Highlights

  • AI & Logic: Python 3.9+, Google Generative AI (Gemini 2.0 Flash), and markdown2
  • Infrastructure: GitHub Actions for scheduling, Bluehost via FTP, and GitHub Secrets for API key management
  • Frontend & Data: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS for the dashboard, with JSON and CSV files handling all state-tracking without a database

Thoughts (Why I am against AI generated content)

Is this the future of blogging? Maybe. Is it a future I’m excited about? Not entirely. I am definitely not going to share my AI Slop sub-blog unless that is purely to prove the point. I can barely stand all of these huge walls of text that are clearly written by AI but presented as if humans had written it. Why would you read it? You can just prompt your favorite LLM to give you answers you really need. I almost want to vomit from all this clearly AI generated text with no personal substance or real opinions. Sorry for being this vivid, but again: AI would not write that it wants to vomit because of the text it has written. 

And just to be clear, I do use LLM as a tool to help with my writing, but just not to write instead of me: Don’t Outsource Your Thinking: Why I Write Instead of Prompt

So where does the value of blog posts come from?

In my opinion the value comes from giving your own perspective, from sharing your opinions, driving your own arguments, and, yes, while bloggers can and do use LLM to find blind spots and to arrive at a stronger argument, the arguments should still come from the author, otherwise it is all just crappy AI Slop (unless that was the intention originally).

My ‘AI Slop’ bot can publish 100 posts a day, but it can’t build its own perspective. It can only synthesise perspective based on data it has received before.

My concluding argument is that efficiency in generating text does not equal value in reading text.


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Excellence as Flight

February 1, 2026 Opinion, Success No comments

Note: This is a non-technical post exploring drive for excellence.

I was thinking about what drives people who are top of their field? What makes Alex Honnold climb Taipei 101 without ropes, what makes David Goggins run ultramarathons with broken ankle, what makes Elon Musk sleep on the floor at the factory, what makes Jensen Huang and other top CEOs keep grinding, what makes Bryan Johnson (the “don’t die” guy) blueprint his life, or Tiger Woods, or MrBeast, or whoever you can think is out there pushing the boundary of whatever they are doing.

What makes you do what you do and push for more?

AI generated image based on the text of this blog (damn, so dark)

When I was in high school I was best in class, kind of. Anything STEM absolutely. Physics, math, chemistry were my best subjects and I went on to win many regional competitions and almost made it to nationals. But at the same time I was one of the worst students in physical education and music. I could not run and could not sing. I still remember those classes as some of the traumatic experiences of my life. Not being popular, fearing rejections I poured my energy into what I knew worked, which was the deterministic world of coding, math, and hard sciences. Many of us do the same throughout our lives. 

When I think about people I read about or people I know and admire there is always something in their story that made them push for that excellence. On the outside sometimes it looks just like a bit of luck or good upbringing, which do help for sure, but there is always something else. I will try to build my point by running down some names and you will see how the story adds up.

David Goggins didn’t run ultramarathons because he loves running. He ran to kill the weak person he was. His “cannot hurt me“ and “never finished” books are a great testament to that. I read both of those and it is obvious that the man was drowning his psychological pain in physical pain, much like some alcoholics.

Alex Honnold free soloed so much because he didn’t like the idea of having people around him (from one of the interviews) and because this is the way to cancel all the noise. When you are free-soloing El Capitan, you cannot worry about your taxes, your relationship, or your awkward childhood. You must be 100% present, or you die. I rock climb myself, here is my “rock climbing as a way to cope” post.

Jensen Huang famously said that “greatness comes from character, and character isn’t formed out of smart people, it is formed out of people who suffered”. He pushes for excellence because he views ease as a threat to survival and if you watch some of his interviews he constantly mentions the fear of running out of business.

I asked my daughter what she thinks drives MrBeast. Her first response was “money”. I poked more and she said “power”. I think on the surface this is true, but by looking at extreme obsessiveness over metrics and quality I think he is terrified of mediocrity and plateauing. He said explicitly “I am terrified of the day the line goes flat.” 

Bryan Johnson is probably an example of almost pathological fear and unacceptance of death. I am glad the guy is there experimenting on himself for all of us.

I’m not into golf, but by reading about Tiger Woods it becomes clear that for him the only way to feel safe and worthy was to win, all installed by childhood trauma.

I asked my wife to give me an example of someone famous, she gave me Coco Chanel, looking up her early life, her mom died at 12, dad abandoned her, she was raised in an orphanage sewing there and her designs are a desperate need to never go back to being the abandoned girl in the orphanage.

“You are either the best or you are nothing” – not quoting anyone famous, just one of my colleagues describing the harsh truth of some of the upbringings.

I tried to come up with counterarguments to my theory that people that drive for excellence are those that sacrifice something and struggle. I thought of Richard Feynman, Usain Bolt and a few others, and also  looked up some more names like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Charles Darwin, those who showed up as those with highly favorable upbringings. It is clear that not everyone perfectly fits the narrative I’m building. Indeed many of these people lucked out, were born at the right time and had the right start or were driven by some pathological curiosity or something unusual about them. But at the same time, when you think about it, Bill Gates was famously paranoid, remembering the number plates of employees. He definitely wasn’t running from poverty, but he was running from the terror of losing. Even the “lucky” ones are often running from something, like fear of failure, fear of irrelevance, or something we don’t know, which is more likely.

We often romanticize excellence as a pursuit of happiness. But looking at all of the examples above, it becomes clear that excellence is rarely a pursuit of happiness. It is very often a flight. It is running away from mediocrity, away from trauma, away from the noise.

By definition, to be the best, others have to be behind you. But the real race isn’t against them. It’s against the version of yourself you are terrified of becoming. Struggle does not guarantee success or excellence, actually it is survivorship bias to think so, millions of people struggle and get nowhere, many people struggle in destructive manner, so I see it only as necessary fuel on the path of excellence. Combine that fuel with agency and focused obsession, and you have the way to reach the peak.


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The Internal Protest: Parenting Your Own Procrastination

January 25, 2026 Personal, Productivity No comments

My 9 year old son has been giving me a bit of a challenge lately, like protesting all the time, not wanting to go out, not listening to anything, saying “no” to everything, well you get it, all kids do this at some point and then again at some other point. So tiresome, but, well, this post is not about parenting.

While he has an adult to protest against, I realized that his external protesting is identical to the internal protesting I feel fairly often, and each one of us feels at times. We just don’t feel like doing something. It is likely a very similar mechanism to what kids experience except we are adults to ourselves. One part of our brain knows we “have to” do something, while the other part resists, looking for a shortcut or a break, like telling yourself that you will do it tomorrow. You know, tomorrow that mysterious place where 99% of human productivity is preserved.

Gemini LLM generated hacking of the Temporal Motivation Formula based on contents of this blog post.

In adults, this resistance usually looks like procrastination. Sometimes it is just watching Netflix or doing literally nothing. This form of procrastination is bad if it is supplemented with feelings of guilt. But often procrastination masks itself as productivity. One of my past coworkers once told me he “procrastinates by doing work.” He would avoid the one terrifying, high-impact task by doing ten smaller, easier tasks.

I do this too. If I have to work on a complex design document that requires untangling a messy legacy system, I might find myself refactoring some code instead or tidying the issue tracker. It feels like work, but it’s actually a form of avoidance. There is a term for this. It’s called structured procrastination.

I’ve often wondered if people who push through the pain actually get further (“no pain – no gain”) or if this is a recipe for burnout and failure. Do the structured procrastinators find their own path to success?

In the past I found some personalized ways of dealing with my own procrastination, such as: self-imposed deadlines, external visibility and accountability. Structuring things and setting very clear goals works best for me. While these mechanisms work fairly well, they have a ceiling pushing beyond which leads to frustration and burnout. So I was thinking what is that key solution that would truly keep you going in a sustained manner and bring internal satisfaction.

By looking at some of the psychological research on this, it appears a few things are key to this:

  • Self-determination theory suggests that human motivation relies heavily on a sense of autonomy. My son does not like it when I tell him to go out for a run or a walk because he has no choice, but he sometimes joins me in the garage to kick the punching bag or “lift weights”. You might not enjoy that your project is basically given to you by your boss without your own input.
    • Lowering activation energy. When dealing with large tasks oftentimes the hardest is just overcoming the initial 2 minutes of starting the work and that’s it. The protest is usually about the start, not going. Once my son starts doing something he usually gets through it. When I start some unthankful task at work I usually bring it to the end.
  • Not feeling guilty. Procrastination is a stress-relief mechanism in a way. If you feel guilty about procrastinating you feel stressed, which makes you want to procrastinate even more. Beating yourself is counterproductive, instead just resetting next time without guilt is so much better. In one of my posts I wrote “starting something and then failing is OK as long as you start the cycle again and again, pushing the time of a failure further and further away in any given cycle” as such connecting periods of higher motivation together creating an upward trend.
  • Temporal motivation theory explains why “tomorrow” is a graveyard for human productivity. Here is the formula:
  • Where:
    • Expectancy: How likely am I to succeed?
    • Value: How big is the reward?
    • Impulsiveness: How easily distracted am I?
    • Delay: How far away is the deadline?

If we don’t see value in something or if we think our chances of succeeding are not high our motivation drops. Likely, my son doesn’t see much value in going out for a run with me and his expectancy of enjoying or succeeding is very low. Similarly, if the deadline is approaching sooner our motivation increases. Having the formula above in mind is helpful, so instead of pushing with “willpower” you can do few tricks:

  • Decrease the denominator by shortening the delay via micro-deadlines (like completing sub-task by end of day).
  • Increase the numerator either by clearly connecting the value of your work to a big goal (like this weightlifting today will make me more attractive) or increasing chances of success (I cannot run 10k, let me run 5k so I can do it).

Conclusion

When my son protests he isn’t trying to be difficult. He is just experiencing a low in his motivation equation, maybe the task feels imposed, too difficult, or low value. As an adult, I have to parent myself with the same empathy. Instead of beating myself up for “being lazy”, which only increases stress and procrastination, I need to move the levers that I know work and have worked for me in the past:

  • Restore autonomy. Remind myself I choose to do this.
  • Lower activation energy. Just start for 2 minutes.
  • Not feeling guilty. Instead, restart with new energy and do better next time.
  • Hack the formula. Create micro-deadlines and easier wins.

Either way, we need to find proper ways to self-parent ourselves. Good luck.

.


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Frameworks for Generating Ideas

January 18, 2026 Uncategorized No comments

Is there a framework for generating ideas? Do ideas just happen? Today I struggled to come up with ideas for my next blog post. None of my initial ideas truly resonated with me. Next I just started thinking about what my process for coming up with ideas looks like. Usually it is just writing down a bunch of random thoughts until one of those sparks interest in me. But then a realization came to me:

Sometimes ideas come as visualization at a later time – the other day I could not finish a bouldering (climbing) problem, always falling at the last move. I was walking and visualizing myself climbing and different moves and could not solve it. I was walking later in the day and a ‘toe hook’ idea came to me. The next day I went to the gym and simply flawlessly executed.

Similarly today I was looking at my keyboard and struggling to come up with ideas and then it came to me: ideas are not some kind of “magic” that appear from nowhere, but rather they are processes and you can make them happen and come to you. I don’t pretend to have a patent on generating ideas, otherwise I would sit on a pile of billions of dollars, but, anyway,  some thoughts:

Step 1: Input Loading. Any idea out there is some variation of previously existing idea, some synthesis of multiple existing ideas, or some application to the new context. We can say that Idea: Idea = Input A + Input B (in a new context). For example my blog post about Global Maximum was a combination of computer science “hill climbing” and my career story.

Step 2: The Constraint. Staring at a blank page is very intimidating because there are way too many degrees of freedom, but having constraints is helpful. One constraint I’m operating under right now is time (it is 6:00AM, I’m at a coffee place, and I have 1h20m to write my blog post). Another type of constraint is topic based (like how I connect athletic performance to software careers, blog post). There are more constraints to come up with “artificially”.

Step 3: Diffuse mode thinking. Everyone knows the cliche about the best ideas coming in the shower. This is actually a known phenomenon called Diffuse Mode thinking. It is a key step in James Webb Young’s technique for producing ideas:

  • Gather new material.
  • Work over the materials in your mind.
  • Put the problem completely out of your mind.
  • Your idea will come back to you with a flash of insight.
  • Shape and develop your idea into practical usefulness.

Conclusion
This “framework” might not be complete but I think next time around I will open this blog post to remind me that this is simply a process and I can be in control of it and use techniques.


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Building Personal AI Agent

January 11, 2026 AI, AI Agent No comments

Rich people always had access to assistants (+chief of staff) that would help them with all kinds of chores, would advise them on things, or just do things behind the scenes. We live in an interesting time of AI, where anyone has access to these fabulous LLMs that can do some of those things for us. Like, I’m sure most of us are doing our travel plans with some help from LLMs, or we make buying decision, etc. It is just mind boggling how good these things are becoming!

In parallel, as software engineers, we keep hearing about AI agents all the time. We use AI agents at work. The most useful and prominent example of LLM agents are coding agents. You are likely using Claude Code at work. I already heavily rely on LLMs to track many of my personal goals, to critique me, to give suggestions, etc.

But what if I build a personal AI Agent to avoid repeating things and to make it watch me more proactively?

Vibe Coding AI Agent

There we go! Let’s build something simple first. My use cases for LLMs are fairly simple, nothing too crazy and very closely tied to my Life Goals and areas of life. For example, I have chats with Gemini labeled like “Nutrition”, “Finance”, “Career”, etc. When I eat my breakfast I snap a picture of it and estimate my nutrition intake. When I’m considering stock buying I do research with Gemini. When I plan a trip I build an itinerary with LLM, etc. I track my weekly progress in google docs. I track my finances in spreadsheets. The more I think about this the more I realize there is a room for a personal AI agent that is highly tuned to my personal needs and would orchestrate all of this. Additionally there won’t be any ready solution online, because this is so personal, so I’ve got to build one agent for myself!

Email Digest Agent after ~3 hours of Vibe Coding

So what I’ve built in 3 hours is a “personal AI agent that automatically generates daily digest emails by fetching data from multiple sources in parallel: it retrieves stock market insights for ~X tickers, extracts the current week’s goals (with checkbox tracking) from a tabbed Google Doc, pulls my monthly focus items, pulls net worth data from a Google Sheets dashboard, then uses Gemini to generate a professionally formatted HTML email summary and sends it via SendGrid. The system is built with LangGraph for workflow orchestration, uses OAuth2 for secure Google API access, and preserves formatting details like checkboxes (✅/⬜) by converting them to email-compatible emoji before direct insertion into the final email.”

Tech Stack

  • LangGraph 0.2+ – Workflow orchestration with parallel execution
  • LangChain 0.3+ & Gemini API (gemini-2.0-flash-exp) – LLM integration
  • Google Docs/Sheets API – Data sources with OAuth2
  • Alpha Vantage API
  • SendGrid – Email delivery
  • Python 3.9+ – Runtime

Conclusion

This project is just scratching the surface of what is possible to be built very quickly for personal needs. The most exciting realization for me wasn’t the technical implementation but how accessible it is to connect things together. Setting up all of the API keys and then vibe coding all together is so straight forward that it is just unbelievable.

I will continue this project next week to make it actually properly work for my needs and then will host it on some server to send me those digests. Next steps would be to supplement it with prompts to LLMs to give me quick ideas for what I should focus on, better tracking, etc so I can achieve my goals quicker. So exciting!

Go ahead and build something for yourself!


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2025 Recap. 2026 Plan.

January 3, 2026 YearPlanReport No comments

I skipped similar posts for the last three years because I didn’t feel like exposing too much of my personal seemingly worryless life all the while so many of my relatives and people in my home country of origin are in distress. But, maybe, I’m wrong to close myself for reasons I cannot control. I did set goals for 2023, 2024, 2025 and did track them the same as for the past 16 years (!). Sometimes I think that I should have had more success in life by now if I was setting the right goals and if they were ambitious enough. At the same time, everyone has their own path in life, contributing variables, including luck and misfortune, and demons to fight in their heads. I am of the opinion that life is a struggle. A struggle to fight off suffering and grow, otherwise there is no purpose. Time will show how mistaken I have been, but after all, at the scale of this universe, I’m nothing. My life is for me to live.

2025 Recap

Moved to the US. Joined Meta. Made almost 2x more money than previous year. Wrote 24 blog posts. Read 4 books (a lot less than I wanted). Built a habit of single coffee a day and waking up at 6:30AM. Learned some Muay Thai (2x/week). Took swimming lessons and took kids through swimming classes. Went to 7 metal concerts and went into the death wall mosh pit a few times. Cut my social media consumption almost to 0. Failed at building more muscle. Failed to run 10k <48m. Averaged 348 active min / week. Made new climbing friends. Climbed outside. Explored WA, OR, HI with family. Solo-hiked a volcano. Drove on sand dunes. Drove fun sports cars. Built unforgettable experiences. Paddle boarded and biked. Vibe-coded bunch. 3D printed bunch. Realized that time has no mercy. Didn’t give up.

2026 Goals

I have very rigorous and detailed plans for 2026 with weekly tracking, milestone check-ins, and mechanisms to make it work. Over the years, I tried, simple lists, % based approaches, OKR-based mechanisms, latest I have is some hybrid approach with multi-layers, weekly routines and check-ins, and AI assisted course-correction:

Vision (Level 0) → Areas (Level 1) → Annual Goals (Level 2) → Weekly Routines (Level 3)

Vision: Live a healthy, worry-free, experience-rich, financially independent, and fulfilling life. Close the gap between reality and the dream lifestyle, while building a legacy and having no regrets.

  • Health & Sport: Stay healthy for long, have a healthy strong attractive body and sharp mind. Have a comprehensive health protocol that covers strength, cardio, mobility, and nutrition. This can include weights, kickboxing, climbing, running, and rest days to have proper recovery periods. Balanced food. Good sleep. Enough water.
  • 2026
    • Gain extra 8lbs (4kg) muscle weight (150lbs->158lbs).
    • Run 10k race (good time ~52min or less despite extra weight).
    • Maintain climbing performance despite extra muscle weight (V4-V7 range).
    • Can swim 4 full laps freestyle non-stop. Take 2+ swimming lessons.
    • Video of perfect shadow boxing I can be proud to share online.
    • 3 macrocycle rest weeks with minimum activities (50-70% less)
    • Weekly routines:
      • 400 active minutes / week (vigorous 2x, regular 1x).
      • 3+ cardio / week (e.g. 2 kickboxing + 1 run).
      • 2+ strength / week (e.g. 2 climbing + strength session in the end).
      • 1 dedicated strength training w/ barbell / week
      • In bed at 10:00PM, alarm 6:25AM
      • Daily intake: creatine [counter], D3 and/or multi [counter], protein [counter]
      • Healthy food: 3 times a day, diverse, calorie surplus daily (3,000kcal) tracked with Gemini.
      • Min 2.5L (85oz) water. Tracked with Gemini.
  • Financial / Career / Professional: Goal: Increase net worth and streams of income to enjoy freedom of time and life experiences. Target: $XM net worth by age 47. Explore alternative streams of income and potential new terrains. Semi-retirement post 47.
    • 2026 FAANG high-comp (optimize RSUs, bonuses, 401k etc). Climb the corporate ladder as long as I enjoy it and as long as it contributes to the other areas of life. Spendings <30% of post tax income to supercharge savings/investments.
    • Goals..
      • Max out 401k & Backdoor Roth IRA
      • …
      • Weekly:
        • Spend 1h time-boxed on investing (learn & act).
        • … 
  • Family: Set up kids for success in life…
  • Worry-free: …
  • Experience-rich: …
  • Legacy / Growth / Learning / Fulfillment: …
  • No Regrets: …

Each and every section is as rigorous as my “Health” section. The mechanisms that make these things work for me:

  • Routines & Habits
    • For example, I had a desire for a single coffee a day routine. I built it in 2025, for 2026 I don’t even have to write it down as it is going to be a default.
  • Weekly
    • On a weekly basis I do 2 things:
      • reviewing annual goals and deadlines to see if there is anything I can do next week or if I’ve done the past week
      • being accountable by copy-pasting my weekly report template and filling-it in with completion
  • Course-correction and AI support
    • We live in the age of AI. I found that this year AI will be indispensable for planning, tracking, and adjusting my trajectory to achieve these goals.
    • Specifically for each Area I have a running thread with LLM asking it to identify blind spots, critique me, explore, brainstorm, etc.
    • Tracking with AI. For instance, I found it working perfectly to track my nutrition intake: “Add 22oz water”, “add glass of water with creatine”, “add 2 turkey bacon white sandwiches from Starbucks”, etc. It tracks my day perfectly.

In life “you can have virtually anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want”. It might look like I’m trying to do too much with my plan. The reality is that there is the cost in not doing many things. Like, not watching TV, killing my social media consumption, not socializing enough, not having many friends. The cost is in pushing through bad moods and grinding at work when I’d rather be doing something else. It is the constant fear that I might not be spending enough time with my kids or enjoying the money I have right now.

To decide is literally to cut off, so I’m trading off things. I am cutting off comfort to make space for these goals. There will be collateral damage, but I would rather pay the price of trying than the price of drifting. Time will tell if the trade was worth it, “but in the end, it doesn’t even matter”.


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Escaping the Local Maximum: Hill Climbing and Paying Debts

December 27, 2025 Career, Personal, Success 2 comments

I would like to talk about something that might be hard to accept and might trigger the feeling of regret but that’s an important topic we must entertain in our brains. Ask yourself a question: If you are climbing a hill right now, is that the highest hill you are capable of climbing?

In computer science, a Hill Climbing algorithm can get stuck at a Local Maximum, a peak that is higher than everything immediately around it, but significantly lower than the highest possible peak, called the Global Maximum. To reach the Global Maximum, you first had to walk down the hill leaving comfort, taking risks, and crossing the valley of uncertainty to reach the right hill and then climb again.

I have climbed too many local maximum hills in my life. The most prominent was my time at the United Nations (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria. UN is a highly prestigious place to work, offering a tax-free salary, numerous perks, that might include education subsidy, extra long paid vacations, great pension payments, etc. If you get high enough you even get a diplomatic passport and be treated as a VIP anywhere in the world. Life in Austria is very stable, you get an incomparable quality of healthcare, and a great free education for kids. It is just the pinnacle of stability and quality of life you can get in central/western Europe.

One of the interesting aspects of working there as a software engineer was that I had to read some very old code. There were not many people I could consult about that code, as the people who wrote it have either retired, or…  died. I recall my interactions with much older colleagues at work and this made me realize that that place, while very prestigious and comfortable is exactly that – way too comfortable. A place to work towards your retirement, not the place to thrive and grow.

The problem is that you cannot realistically climb any higher. Even if I were to spend a good 10 years to reach a director level (unlikely) I would still be limited by “Noblemaire Principle” and my income and net worth, despite being very high in comparison to other salaries in Austria, will grow very linearly. Just to pull some numbers, a director at UN would probably make just <200K$ net, when a senior engineer with just a handful of years of experience at FAANG in the US would be taking home (after tax) a lot more than that. In a summary: D1 at UN is the peak of that specific hill. Hard to get, hard to maintain, capped upside. When merely L5/L6 at FAANG is still close to the base of a gigantic tech hill that is almost uncapped upside.

Moving to Canada, going through years of uncertainty (another immigration process), was my climbing down of the Local Maximum hill only to climb a bigger hill. In a way that was paying “Immigration Debt” in the valley. I worked for Amazon for a good 2.5 years and after switched to Google, which was a great boost to my income and career trajectory. Unfortunately I was still climbing the wrong hill out there. Yes, a lot bigger than the previous hill, but still not the biggest hill on the horizon. At the same time, gaining more certainly by becoming Canadian was my walk along the valley and staying at the “base camp” for a period of time just to get to the next big hill more comfortably.

The debt is not always just temporary paycheck cuts or discomfort of moving, sometimes the debt comes in the form of relationships. I had my university friends back in Ukraine, and my connection with them slowly and gradually decreased as I moved to Austria. These days we don’t even wish each other happy birthdays. The same happened when I moved to Canada. I still have a base of good friends in Austria, but the timezone difference made it challenging to keep the connection. When I visited Austria two years ago it was great to meet all of them, but unfortunately that’s the high price I am paying for moving around. The same has happened again by moving to the US, some friends are just north across the border. I have friends everywhere but the depth of connection is dissolving.

I am now at Meta in the Seattle Area, looking up at this very big mountain. It is a challenging, rewarding ascent, and I am focused on the path ahead. The “risk” of down-climbing from Vienna paid off with a trajectory I couldn’t have imagined back in Europe. Because I have down-climbed before, I no longer fear the descents. Life is a struggle, I accept it, if in some years spot a higher peak, maybe one with a different terrain or climate, whether it’s an updated career growth or something else, I won’t hesitate to pack my gear, walk down into the valley, and start climbing again, ready to pay the price again.


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