2025: The Balancing Act - Sunscrapers, Family, and AI

Last year was defined by two main threads: building Sunscrapers and family life. Running a company alongside a great team is an incredible adventure, but finding the right balance between business and home remains the most demanding part of the process.

#The Business of Time

Having high agency in your own business means there's always something to do. While I rarely say no when the team needs me, I've learned not to overcommit myself to delivering specific technical solutions. Still, areas like the sales process, delivery processes, and recruitment interviews require my direct involvement.

What really shifted the landscape for me this year was AI. Harnessing tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenCode brought the fun back to my day-to-day work. Even with a calendar full of management tasks and meetings, these tools allowed me to efficiently write code and continue building.

Among a few random prototype projects, I vibe-coded a local set of scripts to synchronize my tasks, time entries, and notes across Sunsama, Obsidian, and Harvest. It even includes a lightweight spreadsheet integration to partially automate invoicing for my sole proprietorship. The most interesting aspect is that it isn't a traditional app, but a collection of CLI scripts. While I can run them manually, AI agents like OpenCode handle the execution even better. I suspect this points toward a broader shift in how we work: builders increasingly automating workflows through AI harnesses rather than building and maintaining standalone applications.

#Family and The Long Game

It's similar with kids - you can't say no when they want to spend the afternoon together. At 4 and 7 years old, every day with them is unique and deserves to be quietly celebrated just by being present.

Seeing their daily progress is significantly more rewarding than managing people at work. Watching them grasp reading and math, create drawings, put on plays, and seeing my daughter thrive in her dance school brings a lot of perspective. That steady development, alongside their solid improvements in activities like skiing and windsurfing, makes the time spent together incredibly valuable.

They've also grown to an age where traveling together brings more joy than exhaustion. Sightseeing in Venice was a blast - the kids barely grumbled and genuinely appreciated our little adventures. Whether it was tracking down a local beach near Sirmione at Lake Garda or escaping an evening storm in a Venice water taxi, experiencing this kind of positive vibe was a welcome novelty, considering how hard it was to get them to cooperate on trips in previous years.

Keeping this balance is only possible thanks to my lovely wife. She works a 4/5 schedule but is always supportive, especially when I have evening calls with US-based clients on CET time. I purposefully stick to regular full-time hours. I'm aware it goes against the typical 996 culture, but I'm aiming for the long run. I don't plan to burn out or trade away my family time.

I also introduced her to AI this year, starting with ChatGPT and later Claude, and she quickly became highly proficient at using it both professionally and personally. I was genuinely impressed when she designed a new kitchen for a small investment apartment. Reviewing her chats, I saw she had seamlessly guided the AI to generate perfectly proportioned SVG technical drawings of the layout and cabinets. She didn't even realize ChatGPT was writing Python code under the hood to get it done. It made me realize she unconsciously leverages these tools even better than I often do.

#Personal Progress

Despite the busy schedule, I kept up with my regular sports activities, which provided a solid baseline for the year. I logged 292,8km of running and 51km of swimming. I also took the time to learn, practice, and pass my motorboat helmsman patent, adding a new (im)practical skill to my mix.