New things in my 2025 setup
New things in my setup for 2025
It’s 2025, which means I did not write much in 2024.
Part of it was because we had our first baby girl in Feb 2024, but part was also because I never felt " satisfied” with my writing. There is always a certain level of incompleteness that emits from the pile of drafts that I have. Sometimes, I would have spent days and weeks on drafts and diagrams to illustrate my posts, just so that I ended up not publishing anything.
So to fix that in 2025, I figure that I should just “move faster” and stop caring about quality. If folks enjoy a better writing style, then they are free to pipe my posts through w/e LLM of choice and rewrite it the way they want. It’s the thought that matters.
And with that, here is the first short post in 2025. This time, I want to let you know more about new things that I have been trying out in my daily workflow. Some hits, some misses but never stop trying.
1. Fountain pen
This one is a “TikTok made me do it”. I got the idea from watching a short video there.
It’s surprising to me as well as I have really bad childhood traumas with fountain pens. The Vietnamese education system which I grew up in forced all kids to learn how to write with fountain pens since 1st grade. At that age, we had to carry our pens around and ink bottles in our backpacks to school. The very same backpacks that we used to chase and hit each other with as typical 7-8-year-old kids would. Our white uniforms are always decorated with ink drops throughout the school years as some kids would weaponize their pens and swing them around to scare away others.
Yet, I do like buying this “Lamy Safari” pen for just 20 EUR on Amazon. It’s cheap, light, and does not require a separate ink bottle to get you started. Instead, most fountain pens now come with disposable ink cartridges, which is a more ergonomic option. I will probably invest in a convertible kit + ink bottle in the long term, but this does the job. I picked the Extra Fine pen nib as I do enjoy the sharper ink lines. A smaller nib also means less friction between the pen and the paper which lets you write faster.
But how often do you write on paper in this day and age?
Clearly not enough!
My handwriting has gone to shit over the years of using keyboards. These days I would rather brainstorm using LLM instead of draft papers. However, the slowness of writing things down by hand gives you more time to contemplate things you want to focus on. Instead of thinking of a word once when I typed it down on my keyboard, I would have to think of that same word 5-7 times when I write it down on physical paper. An enjoyable pen makes that experience more tolerable for me. We will see how long it lasts.
2. Using LLMs more
I was skeptical of LLMs a year ago. “Too much bullshit” as some friends of mine still say today. However, that does not stop me from keeping on trying it out throughout 2024. Every 3-4 weeks, I gave an “LLM-wrapper” service a try: OpenAI, Replit, Gemini, Bing Search, Anthropic, etc… The problem I usually give it is
Create a CLI in Rust/Go that does foo bar using …
And it can often do a pretty decent job. However, I would have to hand-tune a lot of things that made it never worth it. At $DAYJOB, my employer was generous enough to give me a ChatGPT plus subscription to play with but the model quality was still not at the point at which I could use it to code reliably.
However, I discovered new use cases with LLM that I had not encountered before: replacing information discovery (i.e. Google Search). At first, I started to look up different baby symptoms with it. I can describe very rough observations I have about the state of the baby and get the first hints from the LLM so that we can research further. It helped us interact with our doctors more effectively as the “House doctors” in the Netherlands can be quite… shit.
After that, I started to use LLM to help digest longer information easier. For example, we throw in a long contract from the daycare that we are registering with to ask various questions. Worth noting here that the contract was in Dutch and we were asking questions in English and Vietnamese. Not all questions were answered correctly so we would still do our diligence, but it still has saved us a bunch of time across many different contracts and legal articles. Especially with ChatGPT Search, I was able to navigate through some recent and upcoming changes to tax laws in The Netherlands much quicker and without having to hire a consultant.
Finally, I discovered the LLM CLI. It seems like CLI is my favorite form factor after all. I can easily do something like `cat file.go | llm “fix this“` or `kubectl describe pods my-pod-abcd | llm` and get unstuck very quickly.
At work, I found myself doing this
llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-exp 'im using "git commit --verbose", write a git hook using "llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-exp <prompt>" to help me generate the commit message from the diff. Use the existing verbose commit message as part of the prompt. craft the prompt so that the output is exactly the commit message following the conventional format'
which got me a pretty decent prepare-commit-msg hook for our monorepo. After some small minor tweaks and a custom prompt inside the tweak, I now get a pretty decent commit message template to edit each time I create a patch.
PROMPT="You are a commit message generator. Please create a concise and well-formatted commit message, following conventional commits format (e.g., feat: Added a new feature, fix: Resolved a bug, etc.). The message should be no longer than 50 characters for the first line. Follow up lines should be wrapped at 72 characters and provide commentary to help reviewer/reader better understand the change.
Here's the existing verbose commit message:
Verbose commit message:
\`\`\`
$VERBOSE_MESSAGE
\`\`\`
Commit message:"
I don’t expect it ever to be perfect the way I want it to be. But this has already been a really good improvement given how little time I put into it. I am currently experimenting with applying the same tool inside Neovim, my daily code editor. That would save me from having to run `head -456 file.rs | tail -23 | llm` over and over again.
I have recently switched my family Google One account to a subscription with Gemini enabled. I expect the direct integration with GDrive, GDocs, and Gmail as well as GPhotos to be well worth the money.
3. More Apple products
In early 2024, with a new baby, I figured our family would have less time to spend on deep-diving into things on the Android ecosystem. I used to be that guy who rooted my phones to install low-level adblocker and mess around with different dev apis. Ain’t nobody has time for that when all you care about is whether your baby has drank enough water today. So I made a switch for my entire family to jump over to Apple.
The wife is now on an iPhone Pro 15 while I am on an iPhone Pro Max 16. And yes, the extra camera button is worth it when you want to capture those fleeting moments of the baby and share them with the grandparents who live 5 timezones away. Both me and the wife are on MacBook M-series CPU and we have a shared iPad Pro acting as an overpriced baby monitor.
Was there any problem switching to the iOS ecosystem? Yes, quite a few actually:
Screen flickering in some views.
iCloud + services nagging in setting.
The migration from Android to iOS can get stuck and waste multiple hours.
Switching from Chrome → Safari is clunky.
But overall, we appreciate the reliability and ease of use during this period of our life. It enables us to focus on what matters right now: our family and our work. The amount of ads we get was also reduced dramatically on iOS which is a huge plus. I’m sure we will be back to Android one day given recent developments, but I think this has been a good choice for us for the next 1-2 hardware cycles.