2025 is gone. 2026 started at breakneck speed—but my mindset is different from this time last year.
Rewind to a year ago. The team was going through unprecedented changes. Everything happened in a flash. The pace caught me off guard, even though I usually plan ahead. But the wind rises from the tips of grass. I saw it coming. A “curve” would be drawn. Where it goes depends entirely on us.
What happened next, you all saw. Tough problems, one after another. I remember getting calls from Grace and Andy during winter vacation. It was only 4 PM, but the sun was already setting in Japan. I stood with my feet in the hot spring pool at the Hakone Venetian Glass Museum, fighting terrible phone signal in the mountain valley, talking for half an hour in the cold wind.
We’re good at solving technical problems. But back then, most of what we faced wasn’t technical. That was a snapshot of where we were.
Another call came after the holiday, when the project was in full swing. Almost 10 PM. Some data still wasn’t ready. Business called urgently, asking me to rush back to the office. Past 10 PM, the FS building was still brightly lit. That night, Jacky and Amy pulled data in the Operation Room until midnight.
This reminds me of two lines from Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity” (PS: one of the few books I couldn’t finish even on my knees):
- Problems are inevitable
- Problems are soluble
Sounds useless, but there’s raw power in it. It lets you face problems with an almost calm mindset. And solutions often emerge from that mindset.
Facing a completely unfamiliar domain, the team pushed out results in the first half of the year at a nearly impossible pace. Special thanks to every team member’s commitment and persistence.
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
We proved our RESILIENCE—it made us stronger in this broken place. Here, applause is due.
Through this, we moved from the track into the wilderness. We get to face more possibilities. This is a process of adapting to change, stepping out of the comfort zone. Comfort has a price. Only by continuously bearing the discomfort of volatility can you capture real value.
True stability isn’t staying in an unchanging environment. It’s having the ability to handle change. Now, we need to actively change, actively seek outliers, to jump out of the comfortable local optimum and get a shot at the global optimum. This is what deep learning taught me.
Looking back, we were probably at the bottom of the smile curve. The road ahead—how do we walk it?
Looking forward, I increasingly feel we’re on the edge of the next productivity leap. Superintelligence might appear this year. Musk thinks the sum of all human collective intelligence might be less than 1% of digital intelligence in the future. This will be a singularity where economic growth explodes by tens of thousands of times. Facing the singularity, rather than being anxious in the walled city of the old world, why not follow Musk’s suggestion: be an active participant. Think about how to fully use that 99% superintelligence. Iterate and upgrade yourself. Understand this universe.
Whether you were frontend, backend, QA, or PM before—don’t define yourself by titles anymore. Don’t limit yourself. AI brings us more possibilities. What you need is comprehensive action.
Use AI to free us from mechanical, tedious code-moving. Discover user pain points. Focus on real “user value.” That’s where tech people’s value lies.
In the past year, I heard some noise.
Don’t mind it. Work with people who share your values. Create products that are useful to people—
The rest will follow.
In my limited experience, I feel this will be the moment of fastest personal growth. Such moments are incredibly precious.
- Pushing open the door to a new world.