[10/16] 2026 Goal Progress

The usual round of writing up progress on the goals I declared. This week was the week I actually did my home workouts.

Health

I actually did the home workouts

This week I actually did my home workouts.

For dumbbell presses I started at 20kg, basically as rehab, and ended up around 30kg doing a lot of reps. I did that last Friday, and the soreness didn't go away until Tuesday.

But in exchange, it feels like my muscles are growing every single day. So this is what muscle memory is.

Once the soreness faded I bumped the weight up and did dumbbell presses, shoulder work, all sorts of stuff — and now I'm a bit sore again. Thinking about doing some more today.

Going back to the gym after October and November

I can already handle about the same weights I was doing back when I went to the gym, easily. For the stuff you need a bar for, I'll go to the sports center nearby.

At least through October and November I'll train at home and on my own, and come back to the gym in slightly better shape than when I was going.

That said, I haven't checked when my ticket expires. I really need to deal with that.

Sleep

Sleep and daily rhythm have been pretty good too. On days I train, I fall asleep the moment I lie down.

I do wake up in the middle of the night, but it's rare that I'm wide awake and stay up. Most of the time I fall back asleep and wake up feeling pretty refreshed.

Quitting smoking

Honestly, zero improvement.

Work

A big release in a 4-day week

We only had 4 business days this week, but we got a pretty big release out safely.

We also rolled out the AI-employee-powered tool internally and started actually running it on a project. I have to say, I think I'm steadily moving things toward company-wide adoption.

Every employee is being really proactive about doing something with AI. And precisely because they're being proactive, things like API key management and cost management have started to carry more weight.

Honestly that's stuff you should do as a matter of course the moment you decide to go ahead. But our company is the kind of organization that thinks while running and moves fast, so I think it's in a good place.

It merged to production while I was asleep

I've put the AI-employee-powered project management tool I'm building into a real task project and I'm running all sorts of experiments with it.

There are cases where you just file the ticket and AI handles everything through to deploying to production, and there are things that simply can't move without waiting for a human decision. The base is there now. The accuracy still has a long way to go, but it's getting to be pretty interesting.

Yesterday too, stuff was getting merged to production on its own while I was eating, while I was asleep. On safe projects, obviously — things that won't cause users any trouble.

Being able to build something that works while I sleep, by myself, makes me really happy.

The human bottleneck, and where to draw the line

As for problems, the human bottleneck is still there.

But I've been rolling this out internally the whole time, and the people who could become bottlenecks are properly aware of it themselves. I'm getting real-time updates pretty frequently now, so it's gotten fairly clear. And if they feed those actions into the tool I'm building, the tool can cover it instead. I'm thinking along those lines too.

Things have tightened up. Projects not dragging on is a good thing.

And it's exactly that state that makes a new problem visible. There's a question of how far you push it, but I need to think hard again about what humans actually have to do, and draw the line.

Money

A few tens of thousands of yen from this year's target

US stocks have been pretty good. Just now, one of my limit sell orders filled, which puts me within a few tens of thousands of yen of this year's target.

Progress-wise I'm at about 99%. For the rest of the year I'll just hold what I'm holding.

I'm going to stop carrying losses forward for now, clear things up around November, and use December to plan out next year.

Like last year, my stock performance this year has been excellent. Or rather — it went exactly as planned.

The crypto bot is paying off old debt

For the crypto auto-trading bot, I've got about 3 strategies running right now. It feels like they're slowly paying back the debt the old strategies racked up, which I find kind of funny.

It's been running about 5 months now, and I'm still not down several hundred thousand yen or anything.

Saving, income, overseas

Not really doing anything on saving, and no change on income either.

Duolingo is at 288 days. Moving abroad isn't on the plan right now, but I am thinking of making moves toward overseas side work.

What stood out this week

My hunched back went away and my head cleared up

Because of the training, my body — which had been sliding back into a hunch — straightened out, and my head has properly cleared up. That's a good thing. I've got a little more energy than before.

I feel more active, like I'm building stamina. Stamina, and flexibility — those are things you have to hold onto no matter how old you get. I really felt that.

Even in the AI era, read books

With AI stuff, if all you follow is X, you get a lot of people acting shocked who blast out throwaway information as if it were solid information.

Reading books, it turns out, still matters in this day and age. Read a book, move your hands, understand it yourself.

There are cases of non-engineers building products and building businesses, but I don't think just anyone can do it. There's an instinct to it — what happens if it goes this way, this is where it'd cause trouble for users — and that's the kind of insight that doesn't come out without a certain amount of experience.

How do you accumulate that? Books, or hands-on work. Hands-on work is the most obvious one.

But people who are in the habit of actually understanding things — even while leaving stuff to books or AI — I think those people can build a product themselves and turn it into a business, even as non-engineers.

Even in the AI era, information and knowledge, including the knowledge I've been neglecting, is something you have to deliberately catch up on. It matters. Something I keep realizing over and over.

Wrapping up

Next week I'll keep the home workouts going. And at least one day I'll go to the sports center nearby and train for about an hour.

Other than that, more polishing of the crypto bot, and making my main job more efficient. I'll move on those bit by bit, with a plan.