My Top Achievements of 2026
The year isn't over yet, but I want to highlight the coolest things I built so far this year
The last 3 years feel like a blur, living in the time of AI is stressful. So much to try and do! Meta's Llama release in 2023 was when I started becoming obsessed with AI. The last three years have seen a progressively intensification of my usage and obsession. Every conversation I have I probably bring it up, which probably isn't universally appreciated. Sorry! I'm so excited though!
I'm going to run you through what happened this year, what I built, what I learned, what I tried. This won't be complete but a quick overview of what I remember. I can say for sure this was by far the most productive year of my life. I'm so happy to have new productivity tools and intelligence I can rent and apply to problems.
At the beginning of this year I started building a workflow canvas like n8n for working on multi-step tasks, and I realized I don't have a good way to manage programming tasks. Having tmux terminals to manage and anxiety of not being able to check on agent jobs while I go to the store was terrifying. Reading about GasTown got me excited about software factories! However, I wanted one I could control and look over the changes first. I run everything inside a sandbox, which at least previous me didn't know was solved in any way at the beginning of the year. Nowadays Modal, Sandcastle, and Daytona offer a lot of good options for this, at cloud pricing ($$$).
Agent Starbase
I built Agent Starbase starting in February, getting a docker based sandbox working for agents and adding 15 agents to it and making sure I could use all these agents from the beach or cafes in Bali. I learned a lot, especially about the challenges of managing a progressively more complex app with AI doing all the coding. "Vibe coding" has a bad reputation but I think automated coding is the future. I can't imagine we'll write 95% of our code in any other way, it's too efficient to get humans out of the loop. I leaned into coding this way, I was determined to learn how to get my personal judgement + speed of though + typing out of the way as much as possible. I hit a bunch of hurtles, software quality issues, regression in my docker-in-docker setup, running out of tokens, but I eventually engineered my way through all of them, building a software factory I'm pretty proud of, that works and generates more high quality software by the month, without needing 20+ $200 a month Fable subscriptions.
I'm most proud of the cron jobs that run everynight keeping the everyday toil of building modern and safe software toil automated, new models get added automatically to my tools, dependencies are upgraded, failing tests are fixed overnight, bugs are found via regression tests, and research is done automatically in a format I like. You can contact me to try it in a hosted setting, it has all the tools I use to do everything now. I spend 12 hours a day using it! If you see me at the store waiting in line, I'm probably checking on my agents.
Nebrelo
Nebrelo is the second project I'm most proud of this year. I originally built is as a research project to see if I could make kvm management simpler, but it grew into the way I manage all my self hosted apps, allowed me to save $50+ of server spend on VPS instances, and lets me stand up any self-hosted app without a lot of effort in 15-20 minutes of agent work (1 minute of my time). Nebrelo is a declarative wrapper on libvirt (Linux + Mac) that makes it easy to create, change, and move VMs between servers and my homelab. I've had a lot of experience with tools like docker compose and terraform and took my favorite way of working with those and built the KVM equivalent. This has let me develop and host applications faster, without worrying too much about where they will live in the future as I can move them easily. I got the virtual machine idea from Jim Salter as an easier way to manage applications (migrating a live Docker Compose app with multiple containers isn't so fun), and it's actually made my life extremely simple. Being able to have LLMs declaratively setup any app and just run nbr up has been a lifechanging experience. And my homelab and cloud machines can move around easier than they could before.
This has also had the huge effect of speeding up my QA automation for Agent Starbase. I run lightweight Alpine browser instances managed by Nebrelo and agents can use them to test my apps overnight, leading to a lot of manual QA work I was doing going away. And I'm not even maximizing this capability yet, more work to do!
Browser IDE
I built a browser IDE built into Agent Starbase that you can optionally run standalone on a server or Raspberry Pi to edit projects or files. Instead of navigating around with cd or nano or vim you can edit a whole project via a Tailscale or VPN connection (like Wireguard) to your server. It looks good and supports Markdown, Mermaid diagrams, and images so I could replace my Obsidian usage with it for my personal notes. This project took a few weeks but has turned out to be extremely useful, as I can finally search, view, and edit my notes from my phone without a special app or weird syntax.
I Built my First Game
Biz Tycoon! I worked a long time ago as an intern at a educational games research lab at the University of Wisconin. I built a simple level in Unity, it was extremely hard and I learned from this and a very helpful UW-Madison Alumni that game development is long hours and not so much pay to compensate for it, and if you're at a major company, once your games ships sucessfully you get laid off! In June, I was about to get on a flight, my Agent Starbase instance was sitting idle and I had some extra Fable usage sitting there, so I decided I would try to make a game managing a small Agent Sandbox startup while I was offline on the flight. This turned into a game that isn't amazing but is much better than I would have created in three months! I built in in 3 days, playing it and building it as I went. I made it hard, so it's not a idle game, but has progressively expansionary monopolistic gameplay that I turned into about 1.5 hours of gameplay for the whole game. I had fun playing it! And it works completely from the browser, I have a few more games I started but nothing worth showing yet.
I built a lot more this year! Coding agent tools that connect to a browser or server with 100% observability and auditability, an email inbox MCP tool (in early stages), market research skills, hotel finding skills, I started 3d printing and designing 3d models with LLMs. It's hard to share everything, but above are the best pieces, and the year isn't even over! I hope this can inspire you about what's possible with AI, we're still in the early stages, so many things to try still!