Jul 2026 Reflection

Leave coworking space and new idea about work

I am going to say goodbye to Hangzhou until Aug 25th I leave here. Yesterday is the last day I stay in Ali Park where I have rented a working place for 4 months. During this period, I have studied iOS development, Figma design, LangChain crash course, and launched a handful of vibe-coding projects. This workspace gives me high performance of work, but with bad working atmosphere. It comes with comprehensive support services, e.g. network, printing, cleaning, so I just focus on my “work”. The problem of it is that it is still a working place, which means I always can see some “colleagues” calling or talking directly in their workstation. And I cannot let them go if I think they have bothered me because this place is coworking space. I think I am a sensitive person. Some people can ignore other people’s conversations, but I can’t. That’s why I always like working at night when the others have left work. But the condition is always uncertain. I can’t bet on whether my colleagues will talk.

Another reason I decide to leave is I want to try more flexible working space e.g. café and improve my performance. According to my observation, people is not always working when they stay in workstation. Real effective working time is only 4 hours, or even less. Once they figure out what they need to do and how, it is very quick to complete their task. So I plan to move the process of exploration and solving problem to other place. The whole working loop is just like this:

get away with our tools → 
seek for solutions → 
use our tools solve the problem quickly → 
back to the beginning

Talk about AI coding

As I need to finish an enterprise project, this month I communicate more with Codex and ChatGPT (I have subscribed Claude Code, but it is really mean. And I start to hate its CEO and this product). I find I am experiencing the early stage of AI coding. For example, many my developing process using AI resonate Prompt engineering and Context engineering. I know the time I using AI coding tools is a little bit late. Many engineers have met most of developing problems I have met 6 months ago or one year ago.

AI is powerful and they can finish almost any work with good prompt and context. But token is still expensive. It is very easy to use out of tokens of one week if I use Codex just relatively more frequently. And AI is stealing away my fun of programming. Because they can do everything, I just need to tell them what to do and I will never need to think about how to implement these features in code. Worse, codes written by them cannot be understood by us. This feeling is terrible.

I really advise we can evolve with AI together, rather than only AI doing it. Although we can see AI as agent and a digital person, we still need to find a real person taking responsibility. Certainly, AI can take the responsibility by themselves, and codes written by AI only can be understood by themselves. If we meet new problems, we also command AI to solve them. Scientists and engineers only need to improve AI’s working efficiency. It is flawless so far.

It is still necessary to learn programming for those who is really interested in it. Because AI is not always right. They also need correction and feedback. When we communicate with others, communicating masters advise us to align cognition at first. Because we make effective communication only by this way. If I don’t understand what AI is doing, how do I assume what I require AI to do is what they know they need to do. Otherwise they just guess what they need to do.

The granularity of understanding is important now. It follows the principle of top-down. We understand the architecture of a project at first, and then module, sub-module, section, package and class finally. Most of cases, we only need to understand to package level. AI can help us code, they also can help us understand a project quickly and clearly.

Travel in Japan

I traveled in Japan from Jul 18th to Jul 24th for one week. This is my first time of coming here. This is really an exhausting journey. I can’t get enough sleep everyday.

Japan is really clean and everyone here is polite. They often bow, apologize and say thanks. They offer great service for every customer wherever you come form but with terrible efficiency.

Although keeping polite to anyone make receiver feel good, I think it will cause more severe emotion problem to people than those who complain directly once they meet unsatisfied conditions. Japanese make everything beautiful, like road marks, train heads, even mountains (e.g. Mount Omuro). Their cars are always shiny.

Japanese food is delicious at first. They are really good at cooking beef. Many food using beef is delicious. I just get tastes of salty, light sweetness and soy sauce from beef. They don’t add any other ingredients. They are also good at deep frying food. Deep fried fish and deep fried shrimp is always good. However, I can’t like sashimi and skewers (kushiyaki) in izakaya. They are either raw, half raw, or strange position of food.

Conclusion

Last week of this month, I start to emphasize the importance of reading. I just think we in current era are exposed in too many contents. And we are always floating in the air. We are mislead by hotspots, useless entertaining contents, and animal instinct, and have forgot how to love life and live meaningfully.

I am controlling myself to not dive into social media and get more deep thoughts.