January 2025 — Build With Intent

Happy New Year! May 2026 bring us all everything we deserve 🥳

Let us reflect back over the last year. For builders such as ourselves, we were gifted with a pace of technological change that is probably unmatched in all of history. A year ago, I summarised the momentum going into 2025 as “Google” and “China”. How did I do?

I’m glad to see the Google prediction definitely play out; they are crushing it across the board. The Gemini 3 series show that Google is not going anywhere in the foundational model space, and Nano Banana continues to blow my mind when it comes to ‘understanding’ the images it ingests or produces. The world models produced through Genie 3 are a little ahead of their time, but I suspect 2026 is when this is going to hit the mainstream consciousness.

The China prediction was perhaps a little safer - the buds of DeepSeek and Unitree were already emerging… But I underestimated the widespread astonishment the world had for DeepSeek R1 last January. Nvidia dropped 17% off the back of concerns that more efficient models would change the game - which in my mind was such an obviously incorrect prediction that I hope everyone bought that dip. Since then, we’ve seen Qwen from Alibaba and the Hailuo & Minimax series from MiniMax top benchmarks, amongst other challengers. And that’s not to mention the mindblowing fighting robotic antics from Unitree and Engine.ai.

So how else did 2025 play out? I think one of the bigger surprises for me was the lack of agentic AI adoption on any major level by non “AI native” companies. I was not expecting autonomous agents to have success (due to non-technical reasons), but I thought intelligent workflow would. I think the difficulty has been the “long tail” of capturing context - there’s just too many signals that are based on prior (uncaptured) experience, random side conversations, articles which have been read but not recorded, etc. I’m not sure how we fix that one.

However, the integration of AI into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) has picked up pace - a pace I only see increasing in 2026.

Andre Karpathy really captured the zeitgeist with the term “vibe coding”. Earlier on, this captured all manner of activity - but I now like to distinguish between:

• Vibe prototyping - apps built with Lovable, Replit or Base44 that have no place in production, but are an amazing tool for business users, product owners or designers to visualise their ideas.

• Vibe coding - using AI to augment the delivery of product by (mostly) technical users in a relatively traditional environment.

2025 was just one short year, but we’ve seen two distinct waves. The first came from Cursor and friends: Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) based on the industry standard open source VS Code. By integrating AI, developers became more productive and it seemed this would become the new standard… But it always felt a bit clumsy - I previously described it as the “steering wheel being in the wrong place”.

Enter Claude Code (since copied by Codex, Open Code, Gemini CLI and more). This shift in paradigm moves the developer to a higher abstraction - directing and checking the AI agent in a more straightforward (but paradoxically more powerful) fashion. Personally, I’m hooked with the approach - anyone technical should at least try it.

Looking forward for a 2026 prediction, I fall upon these two insights:

1. The Gap Widens. Particularly when it comes to AI-augmented SDLC productivity, the gap between those taking advantage and those not will become increasingly clear in outcomes. In 2025 we were still figuring things out, so the changing world wasn’t particularly reflected in actual activity. This year it will.

2. Impact from Geopolitics. The world is a complicated place, I won’t comment further on that. But as builders, we do need to think about what this means for us, and possible approaches to things like the “East/West hedge” (having alternative software and infrastructure providers in the unlikely event that traditional supply chains become disrupted).

Enjoy 2026 everyone!

Reflections On The Mission

As we start a new year, my mind turns to Activity vs Outcomes.

Confusing the two is one of the most damaging traps we can fall into. And yet, our very bodies seem wired for it - the dopamine hit of ticking a box has been weaponised into Candy Crush and message notifications.

Why is it so damaging? Firstly, Activity can feel like Progress - but it’s a vanity metric at best. More dangerously, the activity itself becomes addictive, even at the expense of Progress. Lots of small - but ultimately irrelevant - completed tasks ‘feels’ like a win. 

After working in both corporate and startup environments, I feel the startup’s need to distinguish between Activity and Outcomes is what leads to the successful startup being able to create products while the corporate often languishes.

One area where this gets blurry is Operations. The Outcome for Operations is often “don’t fsck it up”. Getting to the end of the day with all breaks resolved, all ledgers reconciled and all widgets accounted for is the Outcome. Reaching this Outcome is often the result of careful, diligent Activity.

This is a good thing, and needs to be recognised as such. Many an Operations employee has struggled with the end of year review: “What did I achieve this year? I didn’t fsck it up!”.

Conversely, this is why many people trying to switch from Operations into e.g. Sales struggle - they get to the end of the day having filled out all their Salesforce forms and forecasts, and take it as a win. It’s not. Selling the widget is the win.

However, in the absence of Outcomes, you better have plenty of Activity! Didn’t hit your sales target this month? OK cool, show me the two million meetings you had. Outcomes over Activity, but Activity over Nothing.

As I’ve become older and more jaded wiser, I have learnt to suppress another Activity vs Outcomes side-effect: the dangerous belief in fairness. “It’s unfair that I’ve been working so hard and didn’t get the big promotion, whilst Bob barely did anything except complete those critical projects. He even took shortcuts for a lot of it”. Effort feels moral.

Yeah mate, but Bob achieved an Outcome. Some of the smartest, most hard-working people I know have struggled to get ahead - whilst the ostensibly lazy, smooth-talking operators cruise forwards. Life isn’t fair that way, nor should it be.

The advances of technology have always helped reduce the need for Activity, and this is only becoming more true with AI and intelligent workflow automation. Focusing on the Outcomes is ever more important.

And so I remind myself to keep this in mind as we go into 2026. What are the Outcomes I really want to achieve? What is the Activity that we can do without, or automate? Where can I prioritise that much better? Wish me luck!

Good luck in 2026, and may we all be the best version of ourselves.

Interesting Articles

• New Ways to Corrupt LLMs - fascinating look at how setting context in a seemingly irrelevant way dramatically affects behaviour. 

• History LLMs - interact with a handful of LLMs that are only trained on data before a given year (e.g. 1913). Can they predict the future based on what they know?

• A Guide to Claude Code 2.0 - quite a technical article, but should be something to learn in here for any Claude Code enthusiast.

This Is The Way

Feature A Fractional

We’re On A Mission

Until next month. Together, We Build {+}

Ned & the MISSION+ team

P.S. If you would like to bring the MISSION+ team into your organisation to help, please reach out to [email protected]!