Congxing Cai

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased. - Alexander Hamilton The Farmer Refuted (1775)

Good morning. Forget what happened yesterday. Keep moving.

Software design is starting to look like people management. Old model: - write a detailed manual - expect identical execution - fail on deviation New model: - give a goal - set guardrails - review outcomes That trade-off used to be impossible for software. It isn’t anymore.

We tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. - David Graeber Debt: The first five thousand years

BeReal work for the same reason as AMA: they remove narrative control. Identity is real. Timing is forced. Everyone is in charge. That creates authenticity. A spontaneous camera lets everyone participate. It only takes a little power in communication to spark engagement.

It’s getting absurdly hard to keep a healthy information diet: •Emails •News •Newsletters •Books •Working docs •Technical papers •Social feeds •YouTube •Podcasts •Chats, groups, communities Each channel is overwhelming on its own. Every now and then, I hear a voice from childhood in my head: you should eat more vegetables. Except now, I cannot even tell which is good for health.

We tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. - David Graeber Debt: The first five thousand years

I stopped designing traditional endpoints. I started assigning tasks to backend calls. Instead of: /enrich_profile(id) -> JSON I now run: “Open LinkedIn. Read carefully. Take notes. Decide if this person fits.” The backend: browses, retries, reasons and writes its own intermediate state It’s slower. It’s messier. It’s also closer to how the work actually happens.

Our reaction to the other is closely tied to our self-confidence. - Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo

g.m. reminder: Only refresh your dashboard once today. Keep refreshing won't change it. Go back and build.

AMA works because it removes narrative control. It’s not just Q&A—it’s a social mechanism: identity verification enables authentic behavior, the community licenses honesty, the crowd becomes the host. Most products optimize for polish and control. AMA optimizes for discomfort. It is powerful feature that will become more popular down the road.

Read this Claude Code vs Codex piece and a few things clicked for me. For incremental feature work, both are already amazing. What surprised me is how much better Claude Code does for infra / terminal-heavy work on benchmarks—I do most of my DevOps in terminal, so I was lucky. Also didn’t realize Cursor’s multi-agent setup was that great. Haven’t tried it yet. One data point I didn’t have before is that, across organizations, individual productivity is clearly up. That matches my own experience—I ship faster, iterate faster, and get unstuck faster. What’s less obvious (at least to me) is whether the overall pace of a project moves much faster; it feels like the bottleneck has quietly shifted somewhere else. labs.adaline.ai/p/claude-code-…

Modern backends act more like employees than machines. Old software: - precise inputs - strict contracts - identical execution New software: - fuzzy requests - long-running judgment - outcome review That shift breaks a lot of “best practices.” It also unlocks a new design space we didn’t have before.

报纸上说：幸福是养自己心的，不是养别人眼的。 — 麦加 人生海海

good morning - if you launch on product hunt today, I will upvote it

Reddit is supposed to be the best place to bootstrap ideas. The playbook is simple: 1.Find opportunities from hot subreddits 2.Map real user journeys in depth 3.Create a brand + waitlist and seed it there 4.Build friendships with micro-influencers In reality, none of these steps is easy to pull. Too much data. Too many threads. Redditors are not easy to talk with. You drown before you see a pattern. This might be exactly what agents are good at. No??

Who would be the real-world Hari Seldon? Or the historical one? Somewhere, Foundation I & II are being built right now—I think.

Consumer apps are like slot machines — every pull is random, but the next spin looks better when the machine is hot.

Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. - Peter Thiel Zero to On

good morning. reminder: opportunities are left for people who have other opportunities, so just take it