2025 in Review

I like to write these reviews as a way to take stock, celebrate the wins, learn from the mistakes, and set direction for what comes next.

2025 was a big year for me professionally. I made a major pivot in focus from EpicReact/EpicWeb toward EpicAI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This year was exhilarating, exhausting, and (in a few ways) heartbreaking.

And personally? We welcomed our 6th child, which has been a huge blessing and a huge time commitment (newborn season is real).

The pivot: from "websites" to "Jarvis"

I told this story in a talk I gave at Remix Jam, and it really captures how I got here.

Last year, my friend Ryan Florence and I drove together to React Conf 2024. It was one of those long drives where you solve the world's problems between snacks and bathroom breaks. We talked a lot about React, what the future of Remix/React Router might be, and (more broadly) the future of user interaction.

At React Conf, Evan Bacon gave a demo that lodged itself in my brain. Asking questions to AI and getting text back is neat, but the better user experience is when the response is interactive. Native UI, not just paragraphs. (I made an article/video about this later: The Future of AI Interaction: Beyond Just Text).

Fast forward a few months. I'd just finished Epic Web Conf 2025 and my head was full of web/React/React Router thoughts. Ryan was supposed to speak, but he got sick, so I brought all his swag to his house the next day and we chatted. That conversation went straight back to the "future of interaction" topic and we basically reduced it down to one word: Jarvis.

Jarvis (Iron Man's assistant) isn't "a chatbot." Jarvis is the interface. Jarvis knows you, keeps context across your life, and can do things.

And in that conversation, Ryan told me about the Model Context Protocol (MCP). That weekend flipped a switch for me. Everything before was React and Remix and React Router and then suddenly I was like: "This is it. We can actually do this now. We can make a huge leap into a new way users interact with software."

For the last couple years, the industry message has been: "Add a chatbot to your app." I think we're leaving that era. The next era is: Add your app to the chatbot.

Users don't want to visit five different apps and re-explain themselves five different times. They want one assistant that can coordinate across services. And for that to work, we need a standard protocol that lets all of us plug in, not just the biggest companies with bespoke integrations.

That's the core idea that pulled me toward EpicAI and MCP.

EpicAI: a new home for the MCP era

In March, I launched EpicAI.pro.

This year felt like going from "I think this is important" to "oh wow, this is definitely important" in real time.

Some highlights:

Posts: I wrote a bunch on EpicAI. If you want the list, they're all on the EpicAI posts page.
Workshops: We ran a bunch of MCP workshops. The full list is on the events page.
Self-paced workshop launch: I'm really proud of Epic MCP: From Scratch to Production.

This whole effort has been about helping people build real MCP servers (things that can stand up in production) and helping them catch the vision for what MCP unlocks when combined with great UI.

Things just keep happening to confirm this is the direction people are going. There are plenty of nay-sayers and skeptics outside of the MCP community, but all the right players are participating and in 2026 we're going to see an explosion of MCP-powered apps (mostly thanks to ChatGPT's adoption of MCP Apps I think).

Epic Workshop App improvements (and the new CLI experience)

A huge part of making EpicAI (and Epic Web) content actually usable is the Epic Workshop App (a.k.a. epicshop). We (me, contributors, Copilot, and Cursor) made a bunch of improvements throughout 2025, but the biggest win (in my opinion) was the new CLI experience.

Over the year, the CLI got dramatically smoother and more capable: it was renamed to epicshop, the commands were flattened/simplified, and a lot of the workflow became interactive (picking workshops/subcommands, opening the workshop in your editor, choosing custom clone destinations, better guidance messages, and a bunch of cross-platform polish (especially on Windows).

You can now manage your workshops by simply running npx epicshop and I think that's cool.

On top of that, the app itself kept leveling up too. Things like improved error handling, better update flows, quality-of-life shortcuts, richer "presence" information, and even MCP-related upgrades (including MCP server improvements).

If you're curious about the details, the full release notes live in the epicshop repo, but the headline is: it's becoming a real product-quality experience for running workshops locally (and that matters a lot when you're teaching people to build real things).

Epic Stack updates

Even with my focus shifting hard toward EpicAI, the Epic Stack kept moving forward in a big way this year (huge thanks to everyone who helped).

Some highlights from the 2025 releases:

We moved the stack forward with React Router v7 and the surrounding improvements to keep things modern and maintainable.
We added passkeys, made a bunch of security/performance improvements, and shipped a pile of quality-of-life fixes.
We made some meaningful infrastructure/tooling changes, like moving image storage to Tigris and adding image optimization via openimg.
We upgraded to Tailwind v4.
Later in the year we migrated from remix-flat-routes to react-router-auto-routes and added react-router-devtools.

If you want the full blow-by-blow, the release notes are all here: Epic Stack releases.

Seriously: thank you to everyone who opened issues, submitted PRs, reviewed, and helped keep the stack healthy. The Epic Stack is better because of your contributions.

Epic Web Conf 2025 (and why it hurts)

In March we ran Epic Web Conf 2025 in Salt Lake City. We did a workshop day and a conference day, and (as always) the people made it special.

Epic React

Epic AI

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