The Year I Stopped Posting: All In on AI, Welcomed a Baby, and Went to Grad School

I opened the Juejin app and glanced at my last update — it stopped exactly one year ago.

It's not that I didn't want to write; it's that this year was simply packed too full. If I had to sum it up in a few keywords, they would be:

1. All In on AI;

2. Wife's pregnancy → baby's birth;

3. Studying for a graduate degree while working.

Today, I finally sat down to talk about what happened this year, as a way to give myself a sense of closure.

1. All In on AI: Struggling Frantically in the Wave, Yet Always Feeling Stuck on the Shore

The company I work for runs a SaaS business. Last year, it began a transformation, and almost the entire team bet heavily on AI.

From day one, I was swept into an endless learning marathon:

GitHub Copilot, Zhipu, Kimi, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Claude Code... Tools were swapped out one after another, and model iterations came so fast it was suffocating.

Often, just as I figured out the boundaries of one tool, the next version would directly overwrite all my previous experience.

Frankly, my growth in technical depth this year hasn't been significant.

Most of my time was spent on the AI application layer — understanding customers' real needs and using engineering skills to land AI in specific business scenarios.

As for the framework layer and core logic, my involvement was minimal. Watching others write the underlying architecture, I genuinely felt envious.

However, the improvement in soft skills was real:

• Communicating with customers about requirements, I no longer just spout technical jargon but truly understand their business pain points;
• I've gained a more systematic understanding of business processes in several vertical industries;
• I learned to maintain my own rhythm amidst rapid change, rather than being led around by anxiety.

Although I didn't delve deep into engineering capabilities, I didn't let myself idle either. If you are also working on AI engineering implementation, I recommend some resources that might give you some inspiration:

1. https://time.geekbang.org/column/intro/101113501?tab=catalog

2. https://time.geekbang.org/column/intro/101162601

If I have time later, I'll write separately about the pitfalls I encountered during the All In on AI process, and the points that truly made me grow.

2. Wife's Pregnancy → Baby's Birth: From Two People to a Family, Trade-offs Are More Concrete Than Imagined

From the day my wife became pregnant, our household was no longer just about her and me.

What to eat, how to eat it, what she likes to eat, whether to accompany her to prenatal checkups, who will take care of the baby after birth, how to take care of it — every single thing became a concrete, daily question.

To be honest, it's not that we didn't argue, nor that we weren't flustered, but luckily, the family remained relatively harmonious in the end, and the baby arrived healthy.

Deciding to have a child is essentially a reallocation of life's resources:

• Gave up the carefree life of just the two of us;
• Quality of life visibly declined (time, money, and energy are all tight);
• Personal hobbies were basically shelved;
• Social circle automatically shrank; I declined every gathering I could.

But what we got in return is a little one who smiles at you, wakes up crying in the middle of the night, and grows day by day.

Here's a photo of my trendy little baby.

Also, by coincidence, we got our baby into child modeling and casually tried our hand at the maternal-infant content track, opening accounts on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. It's a little extra output from this experience. Although the income was minimal, it left us with beautiful memories.

3. Grad School: At 34, Gritting My Teeth and Pushing Myself

Finally, let's talk about grad school.

I took the exam for a part-time graduate program, not a full-time one.

The reason is simple: my educational background is too low, my exposure is too limited, the economy is in a downturn, and I'm getting older.

I'm afraid that 35 will truly become a crisis point in my career. Technical articles alone can't make up for the shortfall in my academic qualifications — an HR person once told me, "Your educational background is a hard flaw," and I knew exactly what that meant.

So I decided to take the exam. So what if I'm 34?

Give it a shot; maybe the bicycle really can turn into a motorcycle.

The day I received the admission letter, my feelings were very mixed.

Of course, there was joy, but it was equally heavy:

• Next, I'll have to spend even more time on my studies;
• The time I can spend with my child will be further compressed;
• Tuition is another significant expense.

Looking back on this year, I don't even know how I persevered.

I've been out of school for ten years, my foundation was poor to begin with, and picking up the books again required a lot of courage.

So my rhythm was very simple: come home from work every day, finish dinner, take care of the baby for an hour, then sit at my desk, read, do exercises, and take notes.

Day after day, I sat there for a whole year.

There were no shortcuts, no miracles, just sheer endurance.

I had only one requirement for myself: if you're not smart, just put in more time.

4. Final Thoughts

1. This year, I didn't output many technical articles, but I output a very real and wonderful life. I tried things I had never tried before, things I couldn't have imagined doing in the past.

2. AI is still being learned, the baby is still growing, and graduate school still needs to be completed.

If you are also in a similar phase — anxious, confused, pushed along by life — I want to say, don't set limits on yourself. Try more things, and perhaps you really will see a different landscape.