Finding New Ways to Fly: 2025 in Review

"Clarity is not guaranteed—but it sometimes arrives if you’re willing to wait."

There is a fleeting moment just before the sun sets and the light fades, where the gentle glow grants unusual clarity, where shadows are long, offering contrast and refuge from continuous shape and form. You wait for the light to do something beautiful, and if you’re lucky, you are present to witness it. Sometimes you catch the drama—the town in shadow, the buttes blazing, the clouds building toward something. Sometimes you miss it. But you show up, and you look, and you try to see.

When I was young, I wanted to be a pilot. My body wouldn't allow it—the medical gates proved insurmountable. So I took the written exam anyway, not because I thought I'd ever fly, but because I needed to prove to myself that the barrier was circumstantial, not constitutional. The ecstasy and the anguish of that accomplishment were braided so tight I couldn’t separate them. I had demonstrated capability without permission.

I didn’t become a pilot, but I found a different way to fly. This pattern didn’t end with aviation. It became how I learned to move through uncertainty.

I tend to value consistency and seek to minimize risk. Not because I lack ambition, but because I understand how fragile stability can be—especially as life accumulates responsibility. I pay close attention to conditions before changing course, which is why the most consequential decision I made in 2025 didn’t look dramatic from the outside. I joined a small, growing generative AI team.

Moving into generative AI was, for me, a calculated discomfort. The technology is young, the pace fast, and expectations high. There are more chances to fail than to succeed, but something surprising happened. For the first time in my career, my instincts about systems, risk, ethics, design, strategy, and long-term consequences weren’t adjacent to the work—they were the work.

As I approach 40, I’m aware that careers tend to plateau, not accelerate. There’s a real chance that this role represents the peak of my professional arc. If that’s true, I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate. To spend this chapter of my career helping shape how intelligence is integrated—carefully, deliberately—into systems people rely on is not something I take lightly. If this is my summit, it’s one I’m proud to stand on.

This year, I built nateking.dev—a React application that now hosts over 30 essays. It started as a simple website but quickly became an archive of thoughts. Writing remains the most reliable way I have to understand what I think. The site isn’t a brand exercise; it’s a commitment to clarity, permanence, and craft.

GrindLab began with an irritation: coffee advice is often vague, subjective, and disconnected from real measurement. What emerged instead was an iOS application that uses computer vision to analyze coffee grind consistency—particle size distribution, uniformity, and brewing implications—directly from the iPhone’s camera.

It’s currently in private beta, with a public release planned for early next year. GrindLab reflects a pattern I keep returning to: using technology to make knowledge visible, measurable, and actionable—offering insight into something without stripping away what makes it meaningful in the first place.

After my father unexpectedly passed away, I needed a challenge—something absorbing enough to give grief a place to settle. That impulse resulted in Prose, a beautifully designed Electron-based Markdown editor that integrates AI writing agents—not as a chatbot, but as a pipeline: brainstorming, drafting, revision, and editing as distinct, intentional stages. Prose exists because I wanted a writing tool that respected process, not just output. In hindsight, that desire mirrors nearly everything else I worked on this year.

A Direction, Not a Prediction

I’ve learned to be cautious about forecasts. Technology moves too quickly, and people change too slowly. In 2026, I want to keep pushing AI beyond chat interfaces. The real leverage isn’t conversation—it’s orchestration. Agents, skills, and workflows allow systems to surface insight in context, at the moment it’s needed, shaped by what the user is already doing. I’m increasingly interested in interfaces that are generated as we work—quietly, helpfully—rather than demanded and defined upfront.

If 2025 was about finding alignment, 2026 feels like the year to deepen it. I don’t know what the light will look like next year. I only know that I intend to keep showing up—watching closely—ready for the moment when clarity briefly arrives again.