Let’s Build Robots! Annual Review After Graduating from AI Undergrad

The reason for such a straightforward and boring title is purely to echo the record I wrote a year ago, intending to wrap up this “AI Undergrad” series.

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Annual Review Before Graduating from AI Undergrad

A record from a year ago, echoing this post.

I originally intended to record my gains and losses in chronological order as usual, but then I thought: the title is already boring enough, if the narrative is the same, it would be too dull. So I decided to write freely, ranking events by how much they “promoted self-dopamine secretion”.

December: Built a Sword Art Online Themed Blog

Since the blog platform service I was using previously had some issues, and approaching the New Year I happened to see this image as an article cover, I shouted “My youth is back!“. So I took advantage of this inexplicable energy to build an SAO-themed blog from scratch:

My youth is back, I re-watched the first season just to design the UI :)

I preliminarily selected the tech stack as SvelteKit, Typescript + Bun, Three.js for the Link Start animation, and Shiki for code rendering (I only thought of using Sharp for loading performance optimization later). Then I directly opened Antigravity, Cursor, and Codex to start a hearty Vibe Coding session, coding from the moment I opened my eyes until early morning for two consecutive days. Finally, I got the result shown below:

Welcome to visit blog.nagi.fun! There are easter eggs waiting for you in the buttons! No mobile adaptation yet, better on desktop!

Then, with the help of Cursor and Codex’s Agent mode, I migrated all my blogs from xLog. Seeing all the content under my control in my own Repo, I truly understood what “refreshing” means.

This impromptu project directly delayed my annual review writing plan. I was originally going to start writing on the last night of 2025. In the process, I even encouraged a friend to write his first annual review on social media, but I ended up dragging it out until the night before school started.

November: Played with 5090

There’s really nothing to say about this, just one word: Cool! RL simulation is so fast!

October: Wrote an Experience Enhancement Extension for Gemini Web App

As of 2026.1.5

Just after arriving in the new environment and feeling bored, I was scrolling through Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) and saw someone made a timeline interaction plugin on ChatGPT. I suddenly felt that this indeed solved a major pain point for me: when the context gets long, scrolling through history dialogue nodes is really painful.

Since I unsubscribed from OpenAI’s membership in March this year and fully embraced Gemini, I naturally thought, let’s support Gemini to have this interaction too.

Unexpectedly, once started, I couldn’t stop. I later supported features including but not limited to:

• Multi-level folder conversation management (supports starring)
• Prompt management library
• Conversation export (supports JSON, Markdown & PDF)
• Formula copying
• Nanobanana watermark automatic removal (implemented by porting open source algorithms)
• Sync to Google Drive
• …

Come and try it, it’s really useful! Welcome to voyager.nagi.fun to learn more!

I thought about making paid features to achieve passive income, but after some self-persuasion, I successfully gave up on doing such a thing and just kept it as a pure, interest-driven Side Project. At that time, I had even finished the cloud sync MVP using MongoDB & Next.js + Stripe, and was thinking about implementation details while walking on the road, but I still made up my mind to directly implement cloud sync using Google Drive in the open-source version.

Gained a lot! Received a lot of user feedback and support just by promoting it twice on Xiaohongshu!

Looking back, it should be exactly this correct choice that prevented the project from becoming a potential source of pressure for me. Changing from “what I want to do” to “what I don’t want to do” might be one of my biggest improvements this year.

At this point, someone should ask “You said you studied AI for four years in undergrad, why is there no mention of AI, algorithms, or research?“. Then let’s write about what happened after graduation first.

September - October: I Enrolled, I Changed Direction

In February, I made peace with “the direct PhD path I absolutely had to take at the end of last year” for various reasons, so I went to apply for a Master’s. Cramming at the last minute, with no confidence and a bit of a self-destructive mentality, I only applied to four schools in the UK. The degree of the program I wanted to go to most was MRes, which is a Master of Research. As far as I know, it is arranged with main research orientation + a small amount of classroom teaching, which is simply the dream study life, and should also be one of the projects closest to the PhD experience. Of course, the most important thing is actually the realistic conditions: my undergraduate GPA is really not high, thanks entirely to my personal ridiculous course cleanliness, which put me at a disadvantage in applying for taught masters.

Sure enough, most applications sank into the sea, except for the safety school which sent an offer quickly. The school with the robotics taught master’s I wanted to do also sent me a rejection letter. During that time, I did suspect whether I had invested my energy in the wrong place during my undergraduate studies.

Until one evening in April, after running the training script, I checked my email without hope, which I hadn’t checked all day, and found that the conditional offer for the MRes I wanted most had arrived. After a series of striving and annoying sensitive major reviews, I finally enrolled at the end of September!

In October, I selected a research supervisor and project. After summer study and practice, and passing the interview, I finally entered the lab for Reinforcement Learning & Humanoids that I wanted to do most, and started a new journey full of expectations.

I barely used Zhihu in 2025, but I will update some learning records later.

As for why I’m not doing LLMs which I was obsessed with last year, the answer is actually “I’m not interested anymore”. This field has changed too much in a few months, and my understanding of it has also changed a lot. In the middle of the year, I spent a month away from computers and AI to empty myself. After gaining more life experiences, and coupled with previous experiences, I realized that this is indeed not the most suitable field for me.

August: Encountered Rock Climbing

A sport I really like that I was introduced to by a friend. This entry can be consumed with the wrist sprain caused by insufficient warm-up bouldering in early November. I profoundly realized that fat loss is also important while gaining muscle, so I resumed swimming in December~

June: I, Graduated!

By now, this article has become completely reverse chronological, which I totally didn’t expect before writing. After all, university graduation is a very important thing, but thinking back, I really didn’t feel it was very interesting. This subheading pays homage to the article ”[Essay] I, Graduated” that knocked my university life onto that difficult but interesting track in that early morning of my sophomore year. I was also influenced by Brother Ye’s article and finally started using Anki + FSRS this year to save my unsystematic learning method and fragile working memory.

High-quality undergraduate study experience once made me say to others “I will definitely not miss the school at all after graduation”. After graduation, occasionally there is nostalgia for the youth lost there. Some beautiful memories start replaying in my mind. At the end of the film roll is the self before enrollment to whom I have a lot to say.

Before graduation, I organized the Datawhale university tour event with partners from the student organization I founded.

Full text: https://www.bjutswift.cn/blog/2025-datawhale-ai+x

Regarding “Loving the School TV”: It took two weeks to contact the school person in charge to help with publicity, and finally I was suddenly told that the school emblem could not appear on the publicity poster. Even funnier, first the reserved event venue was politely borrowed by leaders shortly after the event started, and then because the person in charge was too dutiful and did not contact the projection power supply for the temporarily changed venue, I gained a rare student experience before graduation: visiting the school control room.

I remember the sun was very good on the day the graduation photos were taken. There were many white salt stains left on the clothes under the academic gown. At that time, I just wanted to end this farce quickly, but there was absolutely no way to see what that day would look like in the eyes of my future self.

May: I was Diagnosed

After going back and forth to Peking University Sixth Hospital several times, I got the ADHD diagnosis and medication, and made peace with my former self. I remember the first two weeks of taking medicine were really wonderful, I was omnipotent with full execution and solved many problems. Of course, the hindsight is that the limitations of medication are also obvious. Non-toxic environment + exercise + support from friends/family + suitable supplements (such as Vitamin D, Magnesium, DHA, etc.) and tools (such as Anki, LLM) - if these can be achieved, in the long run, it is definitely more beneficial to body and mind than direct drug intervention. Currently, I only take medicine on very important occasions or when I really procrastinate until the day before the DDL.

I remember someone asked in an article a year ago, isn’t ADHD attention deficit? Why hyper-focus? Here my answer is that my energy is endless for things I am interested enough in. As long as I still have passion, I will live for passion and follow my passion. For research, this passion is called humanoid robots and RL. Fortunately, I still have passion now, and I am confident in maintaining it for the next ten years.

The first four months of 2025 really didn’t have content I would be happy to record now, but I will definitely write a complete “I, Graduated” in the future, and these things that seem uninteresting now will also be included.

Epilogue

Summarizing this year with two words: Courage and Passion. Courage allowed me to gain many precious experiences and things, and meet many people (welcome to connect). Passion is responsible for pushing me to act, keeping me endlessly curious about all unknowns.

However, curiosity about PhD should be temporarily shelved, turning to internships and work in new fields in the future.

Just finished the blog project that harmed me a lot. Today is the first day of school with no classes, I must catch up on research progress!!!

Thank you for reading this far, Happy New Year~