Once I started using AI to help me write, I noticed a few patterns.
Pattern 1: The deep opening
It opens with something that sounds profound: "In this era of rapid change, X is redefining how we ..."
Or: "Most people think X. The real problem is Y."
Lately I read Andrew Ng's new post on X, AI Engineering Skills Map: Shaping the build, and it made me, an engineer of more than ten years, anxious about my career.
The core is one sentence: a strong software engineer in the AI era has to move past implementing requirements someon…
Read more — 14. When Code Gets Cheap, Where Does a Developer's Value Go
For more than twenty years the internet ran on a stable supply-and-demand relationship where everyone, or nearly everyone, won.
Sites like blogs gave search engines free content to crawl, and the search engines sent traffic back to those sites. Advertisers could then use that pul…
Read more — 10. When AI Takes the Content, Where Does the Traffic Go
I once watched a documentary where a business owner spent a week living as a poor person so he could explain why poor people stay poor.
After selling his labor for a life that was not so dignified, the owner reached this conclusion:
The main problem with working for a living is t…
Read more — 11. Work Crowds Out the Time to Think About the Future
Life has far more room for error than most of us assume. One mistake, one failure, does not mean the rest of it collapses.
Liu Bei in the Three Kingdoms era hardly won a battle. Jensen Huang nearly bankrupted Nvidia more than once.
Life is a bit like an exam. If you want full mar…
I found an interesting thread where the author shares seven prompts for using AI to find ways to create wealth. I have not tried them properly yet, so I will update this once I have results.
https://x.com/raul_ia_prod/status/2091446726217363675?s=46
Find my hidden skills. Given m…
I found vibeprompts.dev, a site with templates that generate Tailwind CSS components from natural language. Handy to use: it amounts to describing a web page or a component in plain words. My guess is they feed existing components to an agent and let it write the prompts.
A simpl…
Power is getting other people to do what you want, even when it goes against their own wishes. The methods that work best are force, control of resources, and ideology.
The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought defines it this way: Actor C openly tries to get actor R to do…
I read a post on Zhihu: From Superpowers to Matt Pocock: Five Things a 200k-Star Skill Library Taught Me. Matt's approach fits how I work with agents today better than Superpowers does.
The post says:
Superpowers bets that a methodology can take over and save you the judgment. It…
Read more — 06. When AI Gets More Capable, Keep the Judgment
A genuinely good game has a core pleasure that cuts through the era it was made in.
I read that line in an article and agreed with it immediately. A good game can be replayed endlessly, and the choices may lead somewhere different each time. That is what fascinates me.
In 2023 my…
GrantDai.com is undergoing a complete rebuild.
The new homepage brings long-form posts and site updates into one chronological feed. Posts now live under /posts, while website and project progress lives under /updates. Chinese and English content remain independently authored and…
Imagination—and our ability to make connections between things—may be one of the most powerful tools humans have ever had. But I have started to feel that this ability is being weakened by modern life.
I can see it in myself. My own capacity for imagination has clearly deteriorat…