Lots of stuff happened this year - I finished my book (not without challenges), contributed to AutoGen and the new Microsoft Agent Framework, and wrote more than I ever have.

My objectives for 2025, as outlined in my 2024 year-in-review post, included completing the book, growing the newsletter, and delivering more talks. Progress was made on all fronts. Work-life balance was mixed - strong start, then things got busy.

The Book

The biggest milestone: finishing the book.

It wasn't without challenges - the project went through some twists along the way. But I shipped Designing Multi-Agent Systems in November: 15 chapters, 395 pages, 186 code snippets. It hit #1 New Release in Generative AI on Amazon and has sold ~500 copies so far (roughly half digital, half print).

I'm also proud of building out the entire digital distribution platform at buy.multiagentbook.com - payment processing, file delivery, the works. Learned a lot.

Research, Work and OSS

Over the last few years, some of you have followed my work contributing to AutoGen and building AutoGen Studio. This year, the AutoGen and Semantic Kernel teams came together to create Microsoft Agent Framework, and a big chunk of my efforts went into this (together with a few re-orgs). Agent Framework provides a stronger developer experience and better integration with Microsoft Foundry Agent Service.

In addition to core framework contributions, I built DevUI - a UI tool for testing agents and workflows. It provides a chat interface, thread management, and event tracing that shows tool calls and execution flow. DevUI was showcased in multiple Ignite 2025 sessions (LAB513, BRK197) and featured in the Agent Framework launch video.

On the research side, I contributed to a few papers:

• AI Fatigue: Reflections on the Human Side of AI's Rapid Advancement — Victor Dibia (Communications of the ACM)

• Interactive Debugging and Steering of Multi-Agent AI Systems — Will Epperson, Gagan Bansal, Victor Dibia, Adam Fourney, Jack Gerrits, Erkang Zhu, Saleema Amershi (CHI 2025)

• Magentic-UI: Towards Human-in-the-loop Agentic Systems — Hussein Mozannar, Gagan Bansal, Cheng Tan, Adam Fourney, Victor Dibia, and others (arXiv preprint, CHI 2026 submission)

Newsletter and Writing

The newsletter had its best year:

• 1,600 → 8,800+ subscribers (I had hoped for about 4,000 based on 2024 plans!)
• 29 posts published

Key themes: agent framework comparisons, MCP deep dives, UX for autonomous agents, and agent fundamentals. I also reflected on why I write about AI and the cognitive costs of AI coding tools. Clearly, MCP did seem to get most attention (views) of all I wrote about this year.

Talks

• AI.Engineer World's Fair — Keynote on UX design principles for multi-agent systems
• MCP Dev Days — "Agents Talking to Agents on MCP"

Work-Life Balance

Mixed results this year.

The first three months were strong - consistent with diet, fitting in 3-5 workouts per week, lost about 8kg. Then things got busy at work (including the AutoGen + Semantic Kernel merge) and the push to finalize the book. Fitness fell off (to mostly the outdoor ~1.5hrs on the weekend with my 6yr old either playing soccer or basketball).

But I did spend a lot of quality time with my son. This year he got interested in basketball - something I hadn't played seriously in years. We've averaged about 1.5 - 2 hours of play most weekends over the last few months. It's been great watching him learn and having a reason to get back on the court myself.

Also managed two family trips this year.

Learning New Things

Learning outside of work has been a feature of my year-in-review reflections. Last year I studied Russian on Duolingo for 312 days and started learning DaVinci Resolve for video editing. This year, the biggest non-work learning came from self-publishing the book.

• Cover Design: Learned the details of bleeds, color mapping, CMYK color space for print, and exporting to formats required by print services. Did it all myself.

• Typesetting with Quarto: Dug deep into the Quarto publishing system. My research background with LaTeX typesetting helped here.

• Publishing Process: Researched the entire self-publishing pipeline - from manuscript to distribution.

• Marketing and Visibility: Learned about book advertising, promotion strategies, and building awareness.

• Digital Sales Platform: Built and optimized the PDF sales platform at buy.multiagentbook.com - clean UX from payment to email delivery with lifetime access, all running for about $3/month.

It was long hours (especially between July and November), but tons of fun.

Goals for 2026

Nothing too ambitious - just continue learning new things, protect family time, and stay healthy. Professionally, I'd like to spend more time on model training for specific domains (sub-8B parameter models) and build a portfolio of projects in that area.

Conclusion

2025 was the year I shipped. Grateful for colleagues, the 8,800+ newsletter subscribers, and everyone who picked up the book.

Here's to 2026.