As 2025 comes to a close, this is a good moment to take a practical look at how development skills and workflows evolved this year. Across Programming Help, recurring themes included the use of AI in daily coding tasks, more structured debugging practices, increased attention to testing and maintainability, and a clear move toward self-service learning through guides, documentation, and community-driven resources.

🧭 Your checkpoint

Now, think back to the beginning of the year. What felt difficult at that point? Maybe it was a concept you avoided, a class of bugs that always slowed you down, a tool or workflow you did not fully understand.

Then compare that with how things feel today. What feels easier now? What finally clicked? What changed in the way you approach problems, structure your code, test your work, or reason about systems?

If it helps to frame your response, you can reflect on:

• what you struggled with at the start of 2025
• what feels clearer or easier by the end of the year
• what changed the most in how you code or solve problems

There’s no single format here - feel free to share whatever best captures your experience.

🧩 Challenges that shaped 2025

This year we also experimented with new formats for learning by doing. Gear Up, our Programming Help campaign, introduced a more hands-on way to engage with code through weekly Python challenges designed to strengthen reasoning, debugging and problem-solving skills.

If you would like to revisit them or haven't participated, here are the posts from the campaign:

• 🐍 Python Weekly Coding Challenge: The space explorer’s journey
• 🐍 Python Weekly Coding Challenge: The tournament of kingdoms
• 🐍 Python Weekly Coding Challenge: The oracle’s enigma
• 🐍 Python Weekly Coding Challenge: The lost file of the ancient temple

Feel free to revisit any of these threads. They are great for testing your current skills and comparing how you reason about problems now compared to earlier in the year.

🤖 AI, agents, and new workflows

2025 marked a visible shift in how many developers started to work with AI. For some, it became part of daily coding. For others, agents, model-driven tooling, or early MCP-style workflows started to show up for the first time.

• How did this look for you in practice?
• Did AI actually change your workflow, or did it remain mostly experimental?
• How did Copilot fit into your day-to-day workflow? Where did it meaningfully save you time, and where did it fall short?

🚀 Looking into 2026

To close this retrospective, you can also weigh in on one of these forward-looking questions:

• What technical area do you expect to focus on most in 2026?
• What skill or workflow do you want to deepen next year?
• Is there something you avoided in 2025 but want to tackle in 2026?

Thank you for making this community shine throughout 2025. You showed up, shared your progress, took on the challenges, and made time to help others when questions got tough. That generosity is what keeps this space strong, curious, and worth coming back to.

See you in 2026.