Hello, Fellow Tech Enthusiasts! 
Happy New Year! Many of you have been following Ralabs and broader tech updates with me throughout the year, and some of you for much longer. Whether you joined recently or have been here for years, thank you for staying with us.
For this month’s newsletter, instead of focusing only on December, I want to share a short summary of the year at Ralabs and the tech world.
📊 Focus & Insights
- 2025 was a year of AI implementation, team growth, experimentation, and learning for Ralabs. Over the course of the year, we tested new approaches, adjusted strategies, and spent a lot of time understanding what truly works for us as a company.
- We held two strategy sessions, one in April and one in November. These sessions helped us align on what we needed to do short term and where we are heading long term. We set clear priorities for the rest of the year and beyond. This included improving the candidate pool process to handle fast growth, launching new service lines such as AI Agents Development, DevSecOps, and Design and Social Media Turnkey, and continuing to improve internal processes with automation.
- We also set longer-term goals, including growing the company to 500 people, expanding into markets such as Asia and the Middle East, and exploring small M&A opportunities.
- On the execution side, we started multiple new projects during the year. Nine of them became long-term and are still ongoing. We closed the year with 32 active clients.
- We continued investing in how we work together. We held more than 50 shared events, supported over 10 certifications, ran on-site client activities, and made 8 business trips.
- Our latest eNPS came in at 72.22%, up from 69.57% last year. This means more people would recommend Ralabs as a great place to work.
👩🏼💼 HR Updates
- We closed 2025 with 142 colleagues. Which is a 25% increase from 113 from last year. New hires were mainly Senior and Middle-level specialists, with a smaller number of Junior roles.
- Six people were promoted during the year. Alongside this, we completed a large number of probation reviews, performance check-ins, and goal-setting sessions. The overall hiring plan achievement for the year was 87%.
- Social responsibility remained an important part of our culture. Over the year, we’ve raised over 1.2 M USD. These funds were allocated to Ukrainian defenders, their families, trusted volunteers, and other initiatives.
- We also brought the business development team together offline for a strategy and team session in Lviv. As a remote-first company, this was a rare chance for teammates from different locations to meet in person, review the year, and align on priorities for what comes next.
📈 Business Development
- During the year, we closed 46 deals and added 13 new logo-clients. Alongside new logos, we continued to grow existing accounts, adding 14 long-term assignments and reaching around 7.5% revenue growth within current clients.
- We invested heavily in being closer to the market. During the year, we ran four roadshows and multiple business trips across the UK, the US, and the Netherlands. These trips were focused on in-person meetings, strengthening relationships, and working directly with decision-makers. We also secured partnerships with four CTOs, COOs, and fractional consultants who entrusted their clients to Ralabs.
- Marketing and visibility efforts supported this growth throughout the year. On the Ralabs website, we published 38 articles and 14 case studies. On LinkedIn, my profile grew to 9,000+ followers, with five viral posts that sparked a lot of discussion.
- We also hosted eight webinars, launched our first Healthcare Newsletter, introduced Ralabs Insights as a client-facing update format, and released a new Ralabs website design. If you’ve had a chance to read the Healthcare Newsletter, I’d appreciate your feedback. It’s our first time running a format like this, and your input will be very valuable.
- Going into 2026, the focus is on strengthening the top of the pipeline, improving how we manage company knowledge, and spending more time face-to-face with clients where it makes the biggest difference.
- If we are not connected on LinkedIn yet, feel free to reach out and connect there – that’s where most of my ongoing thinking lives now.
💻 Coding Insights
- Software Engineering in 2026.
- 2025: The year in LLMs.
- Claude Code dominated the CLI coding product experience this year. Here’s a Guide to Claude Code 2.0 and getting better at using coding agents.
- AI vs human code gen report: AI code creates 1.7x more issues. Read the report if you want to know which areas AI is not perfect at. It analyzes 470 open-source GitHub pull requests, so there might be a bias here towards people.
- 5 engineering dogmas it’s time to retire.
- Brainstorm Mode – two AI agents work on the same problem and argue toward a solution. Mixing models like Claude, Codex, and Gemini helps balance their different strengths and weaknesses.
- Witr: a command-line tool that explains why a process is running by tracing it back to cron jobs, systemd, or supervisors. It looks promising, even though it still feels rough around the edges.
- WalletWallet: A simple utility to convert physical barcodes into digital passes for Apple Wallet®.
- CSRF Protection without Tokens or Hidden Form Fields.
- An interesting read on how to write JustHTML using coding agents.
- Resurf: a time capsule for your thoughts.
🤖 AI Developments
2025, what a year for AI. It feels almost unreal to look back at how it started.
Early 2025
- At the beginning of the year, we were still treating AI like a fragile helper – copy a few lines, replace a function, paste the result, and carefully check every step. Then the year opened with all this talk about agents and reasoning, and suddenly DeepSeek landed and shook the whole industry. Not just because it was fast and cheap, but because it exposed how much real reasoning still mattered. That moment even hit the markets hard and forced everyone to pay attention.
Winter → early spring
- Around the same time, tools like Cursor began changing everyday workflows. For the first time, entire files and folders could be generated in one go. The output was not perfect, but it clearly showed where things were heading. In February, Andrej Karpathy gave a name to a pattern many engineers were already using and called it “vibe coding.”
Spring
- By March, models like Gemini 2.5 Pro showed real progress in planning and long-context reasoning. Workflows were still fragile and required constant oversight, but the direction was clear.
Summer
- That shifted when Claude Code made long-running AI work practical. At that point, the role of the engineer started to change. Less time writing code line by line, more time setting direction, reviewing output, and correcting decisions.
End of year
- By year’s end, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google were shipping improvements at a rapid pace. Models began understanding larger parts of entire systems and could turn non-technical requirements into working software in under an hour in some cases.
- One unexpected change for me personally was tooling. Over the year, I gradually switched most of my daily work to Google tools. Gemini now gives me better results than ChatGPT for most tasks. AI Studio works better for me than V0. And it would not surprise me if, in a few months, tools like Antigravity replace Cursor for some workflows. Across applications, Google tools are consistently giving me better results right now.
If this year was about understanding and putting everything in place, 2026 is where it compounds. We may soon stop asking these systems to write code at all and instead describe outcomes. At that point, AI stops being a coding assistant and starts acting much more like a builder.
📚 Books and Reading
- At the end of each year, I usually pick a book of the year. In 2025, I think I found something closer to a book of a lifetime. East of Eden by John Steinbeck. It’s often described as a modern retelling of the Cain and Abel story, but what Steinbeck really explores is choice, responsibility, and the human need for love and approval.
- Steinbeck’s idea of timshel – “thou mayest” – sits at the center of the novel. It is the argument that matters most: that people are not locked into their inheritance, their past, or their impulses. Choice is always present, even when patterns repeat. That single idea carries more weight than any plot point, and it’s what gives the book its moral gravity without turning it into a sermon.
If you are looking for a classic that rewards attention and reflection, read the book. And if you want something gripping that stays with you long after you finish it, read the book.
💡 Thoughts
- This newsletter has been all about my thoughts, so I’ll keep this part simple. I hope everyone gets to spend the holiday season with the people they love. For me, Christmas and New Year are about family, hope, and being together.
I wish all of you a peaceful start to the year, and I hope 2026 brings more clarity, stability, peace and happiness to all of us.
💼 Open Positions at Ralabs
- Check all of our open vacancies here.
If you found this update helpful, feel free to share it with others. My newsletter is also published as a blog on our website – Ralabs Blog. You can now read the previous updates there.
Lastly, as a company with deep Ukrainian roots, we continue to seek your support for Ukraine during these challenging times. Every contribution makes a difference.
