2025 is a wrap
In 2025, a software term again made it to the word of the year in Collins Dictionary, vibecoding (after “permacrisis” and “AI” in previous years) and probably more code has been auto-generated (without a “DO NOT EDIT”) this year than anytime before.
So much indeed, that another term appeared: comprehension debt:
Notably, we identified “comprehension debt” as a novel form of technical debt: AI helped us build more sophisticated systems than our skill level could independently create, but our insufficient expertise made those systems difficult to maintain or modify. This paradox—possessing working systems we incompletely understood, created fragility and AI dependency distinct from traditional code quality debt. – 2512.08942 (30 Oct 2025)
There is more to code than code, and we had the chance to explore this in various ways in our meetups in 2025. A quick summary:
- We grew from 695 to 795 members and hosted nine events this year. Thanks to Basislager Coworking for being our home base!
- Thanks also to CHECK24 and GridFuse for hosting great events #49, #51.
- Insights from large scale real world software projects were core to many of our events, e.g. StackRox (Kubernetes Security) in #48 and #51, Lightmeter (YC-W22) in #50 or OpenCloud in #55.
- We continued to explore Go language internals, for example memory management in #49.
- Large language models and agents were discussed in #51 and #56 (all the while focussing on AI that you can actually run yourself, e.g. on colorful computers).
- Many cool open source projects suitable for self-hosting are implemented in Go - how about running a fast VPN like headscale (#51) yourself?
- In October, we took part in the tenth edition of GoLab 2025 conference in Florence, which was a inspiring place to meet lots of Gophers from Italy and around the world. Our contribution was a workshop on ollama usage and internals, diving into the internals of a popular LLM runtime.
- Drinkups across the city: #52, #53, #54.
Thanks everyone for joining this year, let’s explore more in 2026!
