First Half 2025
Just jotting down a few things from the past half year.
LLM
At the end of last year, everyone was still marvelling at DeepSeek’s sudden rise. This year, things have felt much calmer. V3 and R1 both received some incremental upgrades in the first half of the year, but neither created the same industry-wide shockwave as before. Solid updates, yes — but nothing explosive.
Manus, on the other hand, suddenly went viral in March. For a while, everyone was scrambling for invite codes. But now Butterfly Effect, Manus’s parent company, is reportedly going through large-scale layoffs in China and has moved its headquarters to Singapore. Things change fast.
Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT have all had model upgrades recently as well. After the initial hype, though, the actual experience feels fine. Good, but not magical. It makes me wonder: is the Scaling Law finally starting to hit a wall?
Over the past six months, I also tried more AI tools, including v0, Warp, n8n, Zed, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and a few others. None of them gave me the same feeling I had when I first used Cursor. And lately, even Cursor itself feels like it has become a bit dumber.
Games
Recently, because I wanted to play Death Stranding 2, and I finally went back and finished Death Stranding: Director’s Cut.
I have to say, the visual leap in Death Stranding 2 is huge. The mountain details in the opening scene, the quality of the character models, the atmosphere of the environments, and Woodkid’s grand, cinematic music all come together beautifully.
Here are a few spoiler-free screenshots from the PS5 Pro version.
The magic of Kojima’s games is that he always make me want to know what happens next. Basically, after every delivery, there is a flashback, a cutscene, or some little piece of story that pulls me forward. To find the next answer, and pick up the next order.
Compared with the opening, the pacing of the final chapters accelerates very quickly. This one feels more like an ensemble drama. It still carries Kojima’s familiar sense of fate and romance, while also folding all kinds of wild, imaginative ideas into the actual gameplay.
In many ways, Death Stranding 2 feels like a more polished and more fun evolution of the first game. But artistically, I do think it loses a little of the strange, lonely purity of the original.
I really hope a future update adds a story replay feature. Right now, if you want to rewatch scenes related to Tomorrow, you have to dig them up on YouTube.
Work
Work is still mostly a regular 9-to-5.
Since the beginning of this year, I’ve gradually shifted from fuzzing and penetration testing to more internal tool development and process-related work. Recently, I’ve also started getting involved in some AI projects within the department. The main focus is automatically linking requirements with test cases, along with some early research into potential Agent-based tools for internal workflows.
Interestingly, I found that NVIDIA’s DriveOS team has an Agent framework that seems quite aligned with our department’s process. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be open source. The only thing I could find was this blog post.
Life
Lately, I’ve been wanting to get back into working out. But every time I get home, the motivation mysteriously evaporates.
On top of that, my cat has been going into heat every now and then, whining dramatically around the house. In a way, I feel like I’m getting an early preview of the emotional exhaustion of raising a child.
I also went to an art museum to see Van Gogh’s paintings. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as packed as I had imagined.
