Prologue

My dentist sent me a Wrapped this year. Apparently, I was in the top 15% of flossers in their practice. My grocery store told me my "cheese journey" was "inspiring." Spotify informed me that my top artist was Chappell Roan, which I will neither confirm nor deny. Spotify didn’t provide any statistics for use of their AI DJ, of which I’m sure I am in the top 1%.

So naturally, Almost Entirely Human needs one too.

Welcome to Episode 45, the last one of 2025, where I do the thing everyone else is doing and pretend it's original. But hey, at least mine has made-up statistics AND real ones.

(Also, this is technically the 46th episode because I zero-indexed the newsletter like the developer I am. Episode 0 was really just a "hello world." Some habits die hard.)

Statsologue

Let's do the numbers.

The Basics:

• 46 episodes published (see above re: zero-indexing)
• 110 humans who voluntarily signed up for this
• 63% open rate (which apparently is good? I genuinely don't know, I'm new here)
• 41,000 LinkedIn impressions (my most popular post was the UC recap, which wasn't even the most popular newsletter—LinkedIn is weird)

The Writing:

• 70,382 words written
• That's about 280 pages of a book. I accidentally wrote a book this year? About AI? While also doing my actual job?
• Average of 1,564 words per episode
• Longest post: Episode 8 - One Summary to Rule Them All (3,186 words—I had feelings about meeting notes)

The Vibes:

• 88 GIFs deployed
• 44 custom -logues invented (🦃logue, ✨ologue, Trust-but-verifyologue, Inflammalogue...)
• Spelled at least 4 different ways (-ologue, -logue, -ologe, -aloge) because consistency is for people who don't write newsletters at midnight
• Claude and I spent an embarrassing amount of time debugging a Python script to count these accurately. It kept missing the emoji ones.
• Top -logue: Epilogue (44 uses), followed by Newsologue and Prologue (tied at 43)
• Episode 0 had none of them (it was just a "hello world"). Episode 14 skipped the Prologue and jumped straight into Whisperologue. Episode 1 didn't have a Newsologue yet—I hadn't invented it.

Yourologue

Your top episode was Episode 28 - Google's AlphaEarth Changes GIS, a little.

Of all the things I wrote this year—the recipes, the arguing with my car, the Arbiter, teaching my AI to paint vibes instead of taking meeting notes—you all picked the Google one.

I'm not mad. I'm just... processing.

Your second favorite was Episode 29 - AIs Don't Learn (But They Look Like They Do), which honestly makes me happy because that one felt important—understanding how these tools actually work matters more than any single use case.

Highlightologue

The stats are fun, but here's what actually mattered this year:

The Arbiter (Episode 38) was the best team-building exercise I've ever done. We built an AI to assign restaurants for our company retreat, and watching the team debug it together, argue with it, and eventually trust break it—that was magic. I've done a lot of team activities over the years. This one actually worked.

The conferences. Packed room at the Esri Developer Summit. Keynote at GIS in Action in Portland. Packed room at the Washington GIS Conference with incredible one-on-one conversations in the hallway afterward. Those hallway chats are the whole point, honestly.

The strangers. At the Esri UC, people I'd never met stopped me to say thanks for the newsletter. One person's LinkedIn Wrapped said I was their most-followed creator. That's... I don't know how to process that except to say: if you're reading this, you're why I keep writing.

Growthologue

Here's the thing that matters most.

At the beginning of this year, Roscoe—one of our team members at Dymaptic—wasn't sure how to use AI. Like, at all. It was new, it was confusing, and it felt like hype.

Now? He's one of the biggest AI power users in the organization. He's figured out workflows I hadn't thought of. He's been building something that I can't talk about yet (January, I promise). And starting this week, he's going to help brainstorm and write the weekly Claude Clues.

That's the whole point of this newsletter. Not to show off what I can do, but to help someone else figure out what they can do. If one person went from "I don't get it" to "I'm building things with this"—that's the win.

2026ologue

What's coming:

More livestreams. I'm a builder, not a writer (70,000 words notwithstanding). Expect more live building sessions where things might break.

Weekly Claude Clues. Short, specific tips to help you actually use Claude better. Roscoe's helping. We've got a whole pipeline built. In fact, the first one dropped earlier this week—go check it out if you missed it.

The Accessibility Map Agent. Dymaptic has been heads-down building AI-powered solutions, and this is the first one launching in January. It reads your web maps and generates alt text for them—a short paragraph describing what the map is actually about. I've been using it myself, and honestly? It's really useful. More on this soon.

And more. We've been busy. You're about to see all of it.

Epilogue

Claude wrote this post. Well, I rambled into a voice memo, argued with Claude about structure, and then Holly made it readable. The stats came from a Python script that Claude wrote for me, which I ran on my Ghost export like a normal person who definitely doesn't overcomplicate everything.

The Wrapped format? Stolen from Spotify, like everyone else. But at least I admitted it.

See you in 2026.

—Christopher

P.S. - I spelled "recipe" correctly zero times this year until my AI editor caught it. Some things never change.