GPT Year-End Summary | What I Accomplished After 15,000 Conversations?

GPT Year-End Summary | What I Accomplished After 15,000 Conversations?

2025-12-25
Ziliang Chen (Simon)·3 min read

This year I started treating AI as a collaborator to build systems and move projects forward. In this article, I revisit the projects, flows, and systems I built with ChatGPT, and share how it has changed me and my work.

If I had to sum up my year with ChatGPT in one sentence, it would be:

I no longer just "ask AI questions"; I started building systems and solving problems with it.

Here are some of the projects I built together with ChatGPT:

  • Personal website www.zillionvisionary.com
    Migrated from a template site and rebuilt into a fully self-made digital garden (blog, resume, content system, real-time backend analytics...)

  • Weekly Tech Radar
    Not just a few articles, but a news production system where AI directly helps push and organize weekly tech signals, and feeds the final writing in modular form

  • Toolipie
    A CLI/TUI toolbox for organizing scattered code snippets, built around plugins, long-term extensibility, and fully open source

  • Daily Blob
    My first app development attempt: an AI diary/life-logging app, from concept to features, currently in development

  • WED World Economic Database
    Multi-source macro and financial data integration, standardization, and visualization; a long-term data product comparable to professional platforms

  • DigiTables digitization system
    An OCR + AI table digitization project that converts historical scanned documents (e.g., IMF, trade data) into structured datasets

  • Multiple research projects
    Data organization, research frameworks, and automation workflows around macro, finance, and crisis studies

To me, ChatGPT feels more like:

  • 🧠 An external brain that untangles complex ideas
  • 🧩 A research assistant that pushes me to structure projects
  • 🚀 An accelerator that gets me into "ship it first" mindset

The biggest change this year is one sentence:
Many projects did not start after everything was figured out, but were built step by step through conversations and continuous brainstorming.

Over 15,000 conversations, no magic,
but it helped me push forward and even finish many projects that would have stayed in planning.

If you are also using AI,
I am curious what you use it for and how youuse it 👀