I believe a “Christmas of Agents” (+ New Year of Agents) is superior to “Advent of Code”.
Reason is simple. Most of us are employed. Advent of Code coincides with work time, so you can’t really immerse yourself in a side project.1
However, Christmas (or any other long holiday without primary duties) is a better time to immerse yourself in a side project.
2025 was the eve of agentic coding. This was the first holiday where I had full credential to go nuts on a side project using agents. It was epic:
75k lines of Rust later, here is what I’ve built during the first Christmas with agents, using OpenAI Codex
- A full mobile rewrite and port of my Python Instagram video production pipeline (single video production time: 1hr -> 5min)
- Bespoke animation engine using primitives (think Adobe Flash, Manim)
- Proprietary new canvas UI library in Rust, because I don’t want to lock myself into Swift
- Thanks to that, it’s cross platform, runs both on desktop and iOS. It will be a breeze porting this to Android when the time comes
- A Rust port of OpenCV CSRT algorithm, for tracking points/objects
- In-engine font rendering using rustybuzz, so fonts render the same everywhere
- Many other such things
Why would I choose to do it that way? Because I have developed it primarily on desktop where I have much faster iteration speed. Aint nobody got time for iOS compilation and simulator. Once I finished the hard part on desktop, porting to iOS was much easier, and I didn’t lock myself in to Apple
Some of these would have been unimaginable without agents, like creating a UI library from scratch in Rust. But when you have infinite workforce, you can ask for crazy things like “create a textbox component from scratch”
What I’ve built is very similar in nature to CapCut, except that I am a single person and I’ve built it over 1 week
What have you built this Christmas with agents?
-
You could maybe work in the evening after work, but unless you are slacking at work full time, it won’t be the same thing as full immersion. ↩