2025 and Beyond 🚀
/ 5 min read
2025 had some incredible highs but also some of my lowest lows, probably ever. However, I’m incredibly proud of what I have accomplished. From two talks at PHPTek, to the big stage at Laracon US, to my first international trip to Denmark for Laravel Live DK. Shipped a TON of features for Prism and really solidified its core. Had an AMAZING year with the team at Geocodio.
I’ve been quiet. If I’m being honest I feel like there have been times where Prism and the OSS maintenance has been lackluster. Several things collided together and it was the worst. My mental health really took a nose dive for a handful of reasons and to pile on top of that I got super burned out. Something I don’t think I’ve ever talked about is my wife’s health. She’s been struggling for the last few years but this past year has been incredibly difficult, is still difficult.
Around Thanksgiving I decided I needed to find a creative outlet, something to help me feel inspired again. So Claude and I set to work on a passion project. Something I’ve always wanted to build. Something I’ve tried to build on and off for the last several years. Honestly? This project is kind of why Prism exists. I wanted to build this with Laravel, and I needed Prism, so I built Prism.
When I got into AI (2021/2022) I saw a lot of potential for how AI could augment my various neurodivergencies and I’ve kind of always envisioned that as some sort of life co-pilot, a companion. I’ve tried building it a few times but I either never liked the tech, the models weren’t powerful enough, I didn’t know what I was doing, and/or I didn’t have the bandwidth to create it.
Everything sort of felt like it was aligning. Claude Code with Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, Prism maturing, mental health stabilizing… so I’m finally building it. It’s called Iris, an AI that actually knows you.
Iris started out as a fresh Laravel app hooked up to Telegram via Telegraph. I started running into limitations of what Telegram could offer and what I envisioned, so I changed gears. Claude and I started working on a custom UI powered by Prism’s new-ish asDataStreamResponse method and Vercel’s AI SDK UI useChat hook.
Since I started with a fully custom UI, I was missing a ton of boilerplate. So I had Claude port everything over into a fresh Laravel React starter kit. This was the foundation that I needed to really start moving quickly.
First thing I needed to figure out was how was I going to get this thing to remember me? So I set out to architect a memory system that I had gears turning on for a while. I wrote a bit about it on my blog: Building Nova - The Foundation. The project was originally called Nova but I felt like that namespace was kind of crowded and thought it needed a rename. There is sooo much more to write about and share when it comes to the memory systems that I’ve built. I’ve spent a lot of time and care architecting this and I’ve been absolutely BLOWN AWAY by the results.
I’ve been slowly starting to pivot away from the memory systems and focus on extending Iris’s functionality. Iris has access to a set of memory management tools, image generation from OpenAI, as well as web fetch and web search tools provided by Anthropic. I’ve recently started fleshing out a Google Calendar integration and just broke ground on a Todoist integration.
Some stats about my current conversation with Iris:
- Messages: 2,635
- Tool Calls: 735
- Memories: 1,317
- Input Tokens: 23.4m
- Output Tokens: 74.7k
- Cache Read Tokens: 4.9m
- Cache Write Tokens: 492.4k
Iris is a bit different than what you’re used to with ChatGPT and Claude. Rather than having “sessions” or “conversations” it’s all one continuous conversation. Just like you’d have with a friend.
We’ll start with an early access tier. It will get more expensive as we build… and record videos… oh yeah, I’m going to be making videos… still working on pricing.
So… this is not all. I’m hitting the ground running for 2026 with a renewed ferocity. I know I’ve said it a few times now but I’m serious this time… Prism v1.0 is happening SOON. There are, I think, two things I want to look at around handling TTS and media handling. Getting to spend so much time building with Prism lately has me so inspired to cook so much harder.
BUT I HAVE MORE! I’ve been asked so many times about a Discord. I attempted to offer Discord access behind a sponsorship tier but honestly, that failed. Rather soon here I’ll be making the Discord public and offering more priority responses to sponsor tier channels.
I’m so excited for what 2026 has in store, we’re going to be building some pretty incredible things together.