Work felt different in 2026

2026 was the year work started to feel fun and challenging.

What it was like before

I started my current role in February 2025. It was my first job after leaving school, and joining a large company was a culture shock. There was a lot to learn beyond the work itself: how to explain what I was doing clearly and briefly, how things worked inside the company, and how to get people to notice my contributions.

Getting used to the environment and the pace took a lot of time and energy. It felt extra painful because the tasks I was assigned at the beginning didn’t fit my skill tree. My background was mostly in software development, while the team focused more on model development.

Getting a chance

Things started to change when I was assigned to build a small supporting service for one of our team’s main products, from designing the architecture to implementing the features. I’d already built several fully functional side projects on my own while I was in school, so this felt like familiar ground. That was when my teammates started to see what I could bring to the team.

I started getting more involved in our team’s work. One of those projects was building a fleet management service for internal use. Users had to manually set up monitoring stations near the equipment where an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) would stop to take photos. The idea was to let the AMR take photos while patrolling and use them to figure out the best places to stop for monitoring.

Figuring things out

Besides developing the algorithm and wiring up the components, the hardest part was communicating across teams. We had upstream teams providing data and downstream teams consuming our output.

Senior developers had usually handled those conversations, so this was my first time taking them on myself. Everything needed more discussion than I was used to: input and output formats, how the service should behave, how long each request could take, and when we could deliver.

I’d mostly worked on projects by myself before. This time, I had to take small steps and learn along the way—what to confirm, who to ask, and how to make sure we understood each other. It also changed how I approached new feature requests. Before jumping into implementation, I started asking: who’s involved, and who can I go to when something is unclear? Over time, this way of working started to grow on me.

Trying something new

As for the fun part, I got to join the AI agent hype. We have an internal low-code platform where users can wire together components for tasks like object detection. Over time, those components became more complex, so the idea came up: could users describe what they wanted and let an AI agent handle the wiring?

What made this special for me was being the first developer on our team assigned to build an agent from scratch. I was learning all the new techy stuff along the way—how an agent works, middleware, and tools.

The agent used skills to navigate the workflow instead of fixed states. We wrote detailed skills and built a set of tools for wiring up pipelines on the low-code platform. We also tried a subagent architecture to keep the context of the main flow separate from what happened in the sandbox.

What surprised me was that once those pieces were in place, the agent started doing what we wanted. Watching it work felt kind of unreal.

Looking ahead

Looking back on this year, I feel like I got to do things I love. I’m really grateful to my teammates and my supervisor for that.

At the same time, I can already feel the increased workload that comes with more responsibility. I also feel like I’m gradually becoming a small part of a large corporate machine. The job is quietly changing how I work and how I think, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about that. Next year, I hope I can keep enjoying the work without burning out or losing myself along the way.

All the best!