2025.12.21-en

I felt I needed to improve how I express myself, so I’m picking up the habit of weekly notes again…
Also I often read articles once and move on without digesting them—maybe writing helps ideas settle.

Last weekend I went to AI Maker Summit. I saw Li Bojie post on the fediverse that he’d be speaking, checked the site—tickets were 300+ RMB, hesitated, then bit the bullet. At the venue there was no Bojie talk; next day on fedi it looked like he’d gone to the US. Friday he published a blog on his Silicon Valley AI observations—I read it two or three times; really interesting.
https://01.me/2025/12/silicon-valley-ai-insights-2025/

What helped me personally was the “AI coding best practices” bit: break tasks down and keep each AI-generated chunk under ~500 lines. Use different models to review code.

Across the summit, Dao Jie’s talk, one on post-training, and an investor’s stood out. I liked the investor’s line: “We’ve looked at so many projects…”—grounded.

Dao Jie mentioned the next session in the other hall—an agent memory system—and said if LLMs fully solved memory, that product category wouldn’t exist.

That stuck with me, together with Bojie’s post: as an indie or small team you need a clear niche so your product isn’t swallowed as models improve or cloned by giants. Even as engineers we should read AI papers and tech reports to track model progress.

A day or two after, I got pulled into the summit WeChat; next day a founder posted their Product Hunt launch.

I already believe reading itself can’t be replaced by AI, so I checked Product Hunt—“read a book with famous people”—tried the app and it was genuinely fun!

Seeing Jobs and Munger’s lines reminded me of Poor Charlie’s Almanack and the Jobs bio—a way to revisit what I’d read and connect dots. I grabbed the 50% off on Discord and subscribed to the Annual Plan without hesitation—buy more, save more.

I’ve been reading Tony Dinh’s My Indie Book on Readever; toward the end it dragged a bit and I wanted to finish fast. Maybe tonight or tomorrow I’ll wrap it.

Just now another interesting example:

Jason Young spent huge effort and money adapting OpenRouter’s chat format for Claude Code—then OpenRouter shipped a compatible API. Tony Dinh describes a similar choice in his book.

Mon–Wed this week I prepped my thesis proposal defense. Thought I was ready; a committee member said it felt like a PM pitching a product. A labmate said someone might have scored me in the 70s—not sure if I need a second round at the college; results next week…

I’ll save the year-end post for the 31st—something surprising could still happen; the year isn’t over until the last day.