2025 retrospective

December 25, 2025

Merry Christmas! This is approximately the one year mark from when I started writing on this page, although really with the accidental spring/summer hiatus this is barely the 6 month mark. I had an amazing year!! I took a bunch of lovely trips with my stars (San Diego, Tahoe, Maui, New York x2, Palm Springs, Napa, Paris, Berlin, Sequoia NP), listened to great music (including the best live shows of my life – Tame Impala and Fred Again), dressed up a million times, danced a lot, laughed even more, met many incredible people, made many new phrases, stopped bleaching my hair, and became closer to my family.

Execution

2025 felt very much like an “exploit”/execution year for me. Christina, Jenna and I came up with the (novel, revolutionary) farm analogy while sitting at Tootsie’s during week 5: Jenna has been sowing seeds, Christina has been reaping harvests, and I’ve been tilling my fields. I mean this mostly towards my career and intellectual life. While I think I’ve done my most interesting and fulfilling work yet this year, I don’t think December 2024 Christine would have been surprised by what actually happened: I did the AI-for-astrophysics project, took the systems classes (& honorable mention to CS336), joined the NLP group lab, did the AI safety research programs. And the [creative thinking]-to-[“do the right thing well” execution] ratios of projects I worked on this year were all around the 10/90 range.

I honestly don’t think I have had a true “execution” year before. 2024 was certainly an exploration year (highlights: trading, SAEs, Berlin); before that I was sort-of sleepwalking in college, and before that I was just doing astrophysics for fun and being a high schooler. So it does feel good to have just really focused on doing the incremental daily work of becoming a stronger researcher and engineer, and I’m relatively pleased with how much progress I’ve made.¹

On the other hand, there were many days that I felt every day was the same. I woke up and I pushed projects forward by doing approximately the right thing: reading data, double-checking intuitions, cleaning code with Claude, making the right judgment calls, setting up the next experiments. Over the summer especially, I felt I had fallen into a stressful monotony, although this improved substantially once I came back to campus. Obviously “doing the right thing based on previous inferences and executing well” is how a lot of valuable work gets done. But things generally felt lower-entropy, and maybe less grand/cosmically important/fun to think about, than the broad and speculative “thinking about AGI” I was doing December of last year.

It’s unclear whether my intellectual life getting “more boring” is a bad thing. On one hand, it feels like I’ve had fewer compelling or creative ideas recently, and am somewhat less motivated to think about grander questions (e.g. the “nature of intelligence”, or the “ideal post-AGI society”). On the other hand, it feels sort of ridiculous that I didn’t have the execution ability to back up my thinking. Maybe this is just Dunning-Kruger? I do generally bias towards liking big and elegant ideas, so I hope to revisit those “grand questions” in due time with more empirical grounding.

Life and practice

I will be calling anything that involves regular and compounding effort over sustained periods of time a “practice”.

The flip side of having an “execution” year has been that most of my other practices (writing, music, puzzles, even general wellness) have suffered. I think this is because I have strong preferences about work patterns (i.e., being uninterrupted for many hours at a time, and finding it hard to stop and “state dump” mid-chain-of-thought). This meant that the “greedy” choice was often to do as much work as possible, only prioritizing interruptions for my sleep and my social life. But I think even if it was net better in that very moment to skip a run or eat a random meal or not write about an idea day-of, I look back on 2025 and wish I had invested more into my practices.

There are also new practices I’ve been wanting to develop and have not really prioritized. These mostly come from background instincts that I first notice as mimetic desire, although they’ve persisted for several months:

• Hosting; I used to host a lot in high school (house parties, I guess), and all but stopped after freshman year at Stanford. I’d like to be a great host of low-stakes, feel-good things that I can just invite all my friends to. ZAP Creative Sundays will start in February?
• Physical creative work: Even after making the dress and taking the design class, I still don’t feel like I’ve really gotten to the core of this. I want to learn glass blowing and wheel pottery and wood carving!²

On the whole, I think I’ve gotten much better at organizing my life so I can be as productive, as present, and as happy as possible. Some ideas I have found useful:

• Working all the time, except when I’m not: there’s always something more to do, and generally I want to work on it, but also I’ll go on every trip / concert / big group activity, and not feel stressed about the counterfactual work I would’ve done. Experiences with people I love are generally scarcer than things to work on.
• Not saying no to things I want to do: basically, I shouldn’t be so busy/stressed that I skip things I actually want to do (see ^^). This is especially obvious since I’m a senior on campus, so there are always Things and Traditions to take part in. I skipped a senior night (3/10 sad about it), a few football games (0/10 sad), and the Halloween bar crawl (6/10 sad), but other than that was generally able to do everything. Mostly this requires better stress management and start/stop ability on my part
• Blocking: I have learned I basically can’t be productive in a 1-hour chunk. I have accepted this and try to schedule my life in big blocks.
• Not feeling obligated to work-life balance: Previously I had strong ideas about what work-life balance “looked like” that were mostly ungrounded, i.e. that it was bad to work on weekends, or even that I shouldn’t think about work outside of work hours. But I really enjoy my work and would like to do a lot of it! I actually think my ideal “work-life balance” feels something like this past quarter at school: working ~every day of the week³, doing fun and interesting things as they pop up (~several times a week), and occasional longer breaks for going home or traveling.

Adulthood

I turned 21 this year! I think I’m always more unceremonious about birthdays than I expect – maybe it’s because I have a summer birthday⁴? But I did have a beer at Constellation.

In spring I thought I might not come back to Stanford for senior year. I did end up enrolling for the fall, and although I only took two classes and spent most of my time on research, I think just being on campus improved my life significantly.

• Peer group: I had leased a place in SF over the summer but realistically was in Berkeley most days to be at Constellation, while most of my friends were in SF or on campus. Now that I’m back on campus, I live across the hall from two of my best friends. I also reliably bump into people I enjoy being around but am not close friends with ~every day, and especially (since we’re seniors) at big, pre-organized events. It is extremely nice to have my social calendar taken care of, and to have community at ~zero cost.
• Other things to worry about: Over the summer I often (every ~other day?) felt quite stressed about how my research was going. When I came back to campus I started working on a couple of other projects and also spending more time on my classes. I think having many interesting lines of work going on at once helped me be less stressed about all of them.
• General feelings of limitless possibility: Intellectually I know that “real adults” change their careers and life trajectories all of the time, but it is so much easier to feel like “the world is your oyster” as a student! Concretely, we pick a full slate of new classes every 10 weeks, there’s always something interesting to do with friends or student organizations, and you can join or create a new, high-commitment, well-resourced community (clubs, labs, affinity groups…) at any moment. It does feel like as long as I am at school, there is no waveform collapse; I could still do anything next quarter.
• No downside: Usually I hear people want to drop out because they find classes and on-campus opportunities are worse than real-world, full-time ones that school might distract from. I might not really want to take classes anymore, but doing my Fellows and other projects at school comes at little cost and is great for my quality of life.

I still feel not that excited about no longer being a student. Without the structure, schedule, and ecosystem energy of campus, it seems easy live a low-entropy, low-community life by default; there are probably also higher returns to agency, but the median gradient seems stronger. At Stanford, I always have a diverse plate of demands (at any moment multiple classes, projects, social plans) which balance each other out and prevent any from becoming all-consuming, especially because my schedule is always interleaved. In theory I’d like my work to be all-consuming, at least in phases, but I think my default experience of “all-consuming work” can be stressful to the point of being counterproductive, and I’m not sure how to avoid this.

Miscellaneous

• Lots of complex things feel magical to me! There is the magic of systems you understand, and could follow the abstraction stack all the way down, and yet it is just beautiful that it works at all (the Internet, the formation of mountain ranges, etc.). But there is also the magic of systems which feel unintelligible, the “magic” which gets assigned to cargo runways and bogeymen and prayers for rain. I think it is agency-suppressing and dangerous, both for individuals and for society at large, to feel too much of the second form of magic. In my mind, sometimes certain concepts (e.g. kernels, at least before I started writing them) take on the second form of magic, and thus the idea of e.g. an “unfixable bug at the kernel layer” feels terrifying. I have had to remind myself this year there is truth and signal under ~everything.
  • In my research this year, I’ve also had a very “declarative” mindset to experiments: I want to just specify the core ideas, and let all of the implementation details be instrumentally useful abstractions. This sounds nice, and might be what research in December 2026 genuinely looks like, and also was generally the throughput-maximizing strategy for my projects this year. But a) most abstractions in language modelling are leaky⁵ b) I feel more empowered the more I understand about a system c) if I’m going to do this research for the forseeable future⁶, I should invest in learning things that will speed me up in the future. I’m not sure if this kind of learning is better mixed into “project execution time” (where it’s somewhat at odds with “I want to see these experiment results as soon as possible”), or “free time” (i.e. taking classes helped me learn huge chunks of the stack systematically)
• When I step away from my current projects, I feel a lot of uncertainty about what I want to do “next”. I have this sort of meta-desire – desire for desire – and a general feeling that I should have more conviction and discernment. Sometimes I feel envious of people who always seem to have strong conviction in something. I did have very intense conviction this time last year, about how I wanted to work on superintelligence and alignment and the future of humanity, and now this has just dulled a bit⁷, although it’s nice to be doing real work now.
• I have been feeling faint omens of future health issues (i.e. my knee hurts randomly?). So this year I have really felt the importance of proactively preserving my functionality for the long haul.
• I still feel super young. I suppose that’s a great thing and that I’ll look back in decades and wish to feel that young again, but sometimes it’s a mental blocker
• It has become more and more of a no-brainer to spend money on experiences: skiing, trips with friends, concerts, interesting food. I have been effectively price-insensitive on most trips I took with friends this year, and much more down to e.g. fly to another city for a DJ we love. I expect this trend to continue throughout my life, as my time gets more valuable in dollar terms and scarcer in absolute terms
• I deleted TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter off my phone. The effect has been: I don’t go on TikTok, I browse Instagram via my phone browser sometimes / re-download if I want to post (quite rarely nowadays), and still scroll Twitter on my laptop.
• Random one-off things I tried this year: modular music, skydiving, dress design, making architecture models, not eating red meat, not eating high-neuron-per-calorie meat (Constellation diet), having a bob, cheese tasting, aufguss.

To 2026!

Some open questions going into next year:

• Should everything I enjoy doing just have the status of a “practice” in my life, where I build room into my routine and try to improve over time? Is there something in-between “dedicated practice” and “one-off experience” that still feels meaningful?
• What are the personal impacts of my “job” being increasingly automated? If we kind of feel like Claude Code wrappers now, what does research look like in December 2026?
• Let’s call “valence range” the breadth of “how we feel” towards something (clothing, places, people, ideas, etc.). I think I often have a pretty low valence range, but I think I’d rather feel very strongly about a smaller number of things, which I direct the lion’s share of my energy and agency towards. I believe this would be both simplifying and amplifying for my life. Is this intuition correct, and is there a way to steer myself? Or is there some part of my “valence range” that’s getting masked by other things (e.g. fear, social pressure) and I need to do some other un-blocking?
• I have the urge to do a bunch of gap-year-like things: do some world traveling (Mongolia, Chile, Japan are top of the list), go to pastry school, attend a meditation retreat, Find Myself and such. Obviously now is a very exciting time in language model research, and I also feel the urge to be part of it, but I hope I also get the chance to do the “side quests” (sorry, hate that phrase) that require large blocks of free time.
• Should I try to write more formally, or for a broader audience? Currently my writing practice is a ~public-facing diary: mostly personal reflections, packaged as writing for my own benefit, and not much in the way of epistemic solidity.

And some things I’d like to do more of next year:

• Meet people, especially in random and spontaneous-feeling ways. If you have read up until this point I would love to meet you, please reach out!
• Attend or host more one-off Events. I think gatherings with a theme or strong, unique purpose have their own sort of gravity distortion field, where everyone attending is more bought-in by default. I’m not sure I’d actually like to host them, but I’d love to see them happen. Some ideas: spelling bee, “war games”, making a short film, a lecture series with/by friends, scavenger hunt
• Become differentially closer with people I really like! I’ve struggled with meeting many people, becoming friendly with all of them, and not deepening any connections in particular. Life is busy, but also specificity/narrowness and depth feel like they come together; I should invest more in fewer new relationships
• Have a community around the low-stakes things I enjoy (does anyone want to start a crosswords club?)
• Feel more like I did when I was abroad! I think I was generally more expressive and felt things more strongly during and right after my months in Berlin. Even my Berlin trip this summer didn’t match the feeling of being abroad. I think this is partly a product of “situational selves” – Christine in Berlin is just not Christine in SF/Christine at Stanford – but there are aspects, i.e. having stronger personal style or feeling generally less inhibited/”awkward”, that I’d like to bring back.
• Have a great collection of little casual heels and wear them everywhere!
• Go to events, where I might not know people, alone. I don’t really have a problem spending time alone, but (maybe as a product of most of my social life being on campus?) I usually feel like I need to go to social events with someone else
• Be more self-sufficient, by generally getting better at understanding what I need in order to feel like my fullest self, and having more agency about developing/protecting those things
• Keeping personal archives: writing on this page more often, saving & responding to things I read, making more lists and remembering to update them