2025 was an eventful year of progress. I doubled down on my health, had some pleasant career surprises, and my wife and I made time for two vacations.
✅ Write 6 substantive pieces: Before 2023, most of my technical writing focused on RecSys. In 2023 – 2024, this shifted towards applying LLMs. In 2025, I worked to bridge these two interests, starting with a deep dive on Improving RecSys & Search in the Age of LLMs, and then following up with a walkthrough on finetuning an LLM-RecSys Hybrid for Steerable Recs with Semantic IDs. The deep dive was well received and led to an invitation from the AI Engineer World’s Fair to host the first-ever LLM × RecSys track.
The other major themes for 2025 were evals—an area where we still have much to learn and do as an industry—as well as general leadership and writing advice. Here are the six pieces:
✅ Prototype 4 apps: One of my all-time favorites is AI Reading Club (ARC; how it’s built). Inspired by Karpathy’s tweet, I built ARC to help people get more out of reading. I wasn’t satisfied with existing workarounds, like uploading PDFs to a chatbot, because I thought they distracted from the experience of reading the book. Building ARC gave me an opportunity to design my ideal reading experience.…
Source: Eugene Yan — Read the full article on the original site ↗