It was bound to happen.

A rare, not-Friday edition to look back at 2025 and wrap up the year!

Topics for this week:

• The Beginning

• The Middle

• The Ending

• A Lot of AI

• Next Year

The Beginning

Looking back at the newsletters from the beginning of the year, it’s hard to believe it’s been almost 12 months already.

A lot of the same themes and ideas stayed pretty constant through those months.

I was in the early stages of Wave and AI Automation in January, and they both remained active up to the present, and will into the future.

I also started the year by re-introducing a 9-5 schedule for myself and that was really foundational for the entire year.

I was circling the idea of automated content, specifically shorts, and only recently settled on a system I like that I happened to find through tracking n8n content.

I began embracing AI news back then, and I’ve enjoyed tracking it all year.

And with all that, this newsletter began settling into my core pillars of content.

But something else I realized, which probably isn’t so surprising, is I was trying to do a lot.

Lots of projects, lots of side-hustles, lots of distractions.

Developing Wave, implementing auth, migrations, and permissions, maintaining various Divs-related sites, building and managing a cold email system, handling inbound and deciding what not to respond to, recording and editing YouTube videos, iterating on titles and thumbnails, optimizing the channel without over-optimizing it, recording and editing podcasts, experimenting with AI-assisted workflows, tracking token pricing and model economics, orchestrating video processing pipelines, mapping out financial systems and runway, scanning AI posts and job listings without jumping at each one, re-evaluating management vs developer paths all while still consuming more YouTube than I should.

The year started out a busy one, but it’s settling down with a less hectic ending.

The Middle

As the year progressed, so did Wave, Divs, YouTube and AI Automation efforts.

Wave took up a bulk of the work, building a working version for the iPhone, then getting it distributable so others could download it, then setting up the services behind it for push notifications and messaging, then figuring out video processing and operational cost management, then a few more issues and requirements from Apple before finally publishing a test version through the App Store.

During all this, I did cut back on the cold email system even though I got it successfully working.

I decided I’d rather do YouTube to attract Automation clients instead, and I thought I could use that traffic to also build a Skool community at the same time so I slowly shifted to that approach.

Divs also picked up a new client in the middle of this going on so plenty of work was piling up.

By May, I realized I should probably cut back on every-other-day YouTube videos on top of trying to get Wave wrapped up for a release.

Interestingly, around the same time I was considering one video per week, YouTube accidentally took my channel down due to a false “community violation” flag.

Thankfully they quickly brought it back up after I submitted a repeal, but YouTube almost ended that endeavor for me entirely.

Around the same time, I was getting close to finally publishing Wave despite pretty minimal testing.

Once a group of people started getting their hands on it, I could see more issues being dug up.

I thought some of the issues were with the TestFlight version, but the issues persisted through an official App Store release.

So this led to a stretch of serious bug squashing.

Some were easy to fix, but others stuck around for way too long because I was relying way too much on AI to solve problems back then.

We might be getting to the point just now where AI can solve some pretty complex puzzles, but back then I was a little too optimistic.

It took a few days of refactoring the entire app and still seeing the same issues to realize that AI had become too much of a crutch for me to solve the problem.

With a few hours of additional setup to change some build processes, I manually solved the major issues that had been bugging me for weeks.

I remember letting out a huge sigh of relief knowing Wave had finally reached a stable build.

And in the process of not using as much AI, I renewed my interest in programming.

I became excited about coding again.

Ironically, I had already setup a path with AI Automation that would not be using much coding at all so that may have created a conflict that I later realized.

But the middle of the year was an eventful one.

Publishing Wave was a major milestone, creating a fully-featured social media app became the biggest success of the year.

The Ending

With Wave in a good place toward the end of the year, the focus shifted to AI Automation.

YouTube growth with the intent of attracting automation clients became highest priority, and the secondary goal was building a community on Skool based on the traffic.

In addition to publishing videos, I committed to streaming Monday through Friday, which I really enjoyed and looked forward to, and during those streams even built a crazy “online course generator” system that pushed the limits of n8n.

But I also learned 2 lessons:

• Streaming is fun but it takes a very long time to grow.

• I’d rather build software than automation workflows.

These 2 ideas will undoubtedly have an impact on next year.

Nearing the end of the year, I had already started to take inventory of where things were at, what’s working and what isn’t working, and these lessons helped make decisions for what’s to come next.

The year started with trying to do too much, but the year ended with simplifying things way down.

Right now this newsletter is the only true constant that has remained through the entire year (despite missing a Friday publication).

Wave, Divs, YouTube, and Skool are still on the list but final decisions are coming soon.

It’s been an eventful year, and I’ve learned a ton.

With everything that happened this year, it will undoubtedly reshape my perspective for next year.

I’ll be anxious to get into that more soon…

A Lot of AI

AI played a huge role in everything I did this year.

Without AI, Wave would be much simpler than it is.

Many of the projects I worked on wouldn’t have happened either.

I truly learned to work with AI this year.

And I did use quite a bit of it:

Apparently I used 20 different models, switched primary models 13 times, used Cursor 198 days this year, and generated 739.3 Million tokens.

My top models were:

• GPT 5

• GPT 4.1

• “Auto” (let Cursor pick the model based on the message)

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet

• Claude 3.7 Sonnet

• Composer 1

• Claude 4.5 Sonnet

• DeepSeek R1

• Claude 4.5 Opus

• Gemini 2.5 Pro

And I chatted with GPT a good amount too.

5121 messages and 621 chats.

Kind of surprised they didn’t include a token count.

But that’s a lot of messages.

So I used a lot of AI.

And it’s wild to think when the year started, I had just gotten access to gpt-o3-mini, was using Claude 3.5 Sonnet for all coding, and DeepSeek R1 nearly caused the collapse of the entire AI market.

Since then, GPT has now gone through o3→ 4o → 4 → 4.1 → 4.5 → 5 → 5.1 → 5.2

Claude went through 3.5 → 3.7. → 4.1 → 4.5

And multiple versions of Gemini and Grok in the same time as well.

Large Language Models have progressed rapidly in 12 months and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.

I’m sure it will be hard to believe what they’re capable of by the end of 2026 but I’m looking forward to more new releases in the coming months.

And I work with AI daily at this point.

Feels like soon enough we’ll be working for AI.

Next Year’s Plans

Obviously AI will be a cornerstone for any plans I have in the new year, but I am still in a bit of a holding pattern with the end of this year.

By the end of January I should have a pretty clear sense of direction.

Either way, I know more building is involved.

In 2025, I had a tendency to build things that were optimized by external influence or short-term ROI potential, but next year I’m hoping to return to engineering things that I want to engineer because they are fun and interesting.

I’ll still be using AI to do a lot of that coding, but I’ll be supervising and taking the wheel occasionally as well so I can keep my technical ability as sharp as I can.

And of course, YouTube will undoubtedly have a role to play as well.

What form of YouTube video is still a little up in the air, but most likely it will be short form because I believe a personal brand is a really important piece of financial independence, and consistent short content is both a manageable and effective way to build a brand at the moment.

So software and YouTube will remain core pillars for next year.

More details on that as the year progresses.

Lots learned this year, and plenty more to learn next year.

Thank you for reading as always, and Happy New Year!

Hopefully it was a good one, and hopefully next year is even better!

And that’s it for this week. Happy New Year!

If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters.

I also have a Free Skool community if you want to join for n8n workflows and more AI talk: https://www.skool.com/learn-automation-ai/about?ref=1c7ba6137dfc45878406f6f6fcf2c316

Let me know what else I missed! I’d love to hear your feedback at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected].

Thanks for reading!