2026-03-24

One more try. Trying voice logging again.

Last time, around March 6th, about 20 days ago, I tried using a voice memo as the day’s log to reflect on and summarize my recent life—sort of a recap of work and life. Then I used ChatGPT to convert it into a written log. The result was surprisingly good; it did an excellent job of taking my scattered ramblings from the voice log and organizing them into coherent, logical, and clear language.

The quality of the output is quite good now. But I felt a kind of fear—a fear of “losing my voice.” If all these words are not spoken by me, but entirely written by ChatGPT, am I actually becoming something tamed by AI? Do I still have my own thoughts and ideas? Or am I just providing raw materials, handing over the real thinking process to AI, and then selling the results as if they were my own, while I only hold a vague impression and a rough trace of them? Am I still myself, or am I just a slave to AI? That’s the source of my fear.

Please excuse me for eating while talking. Actually, even recording these two and a half minutes makes me quite uncomfortable, because I want to keep my sentences as smooth as possible so that future me will have an easier time when transcribing and excerpting them.

I’m trying again now because this time I plan to take the transcribed text from this recording and copy it into a blog entry by hand, without relying on AI. I believe that at least there should be some things in this world that are written by my own hand. And I don’t think having opinions is enough; the process of organizing those opinions into words, sentences, and articles is actually the essence of thinking, and also part of what makes us human. It even ruined my appetite (I was about to eat McDonald’s).

Today I think there are a few topics I want to write about. First, the difference between voice recording and writing text. Voice recording often gives me a sense of urgency—I have to keep saying something to keep the signifying chain going, continuously outputting. During this process, I can think very little, unlike writing where I can weigh each word and think as I write. That’s the difference I perceive, and that’s what makes voice memos feel a bit uncomfortable to me.

I might leave an open question: Can a person develop this skill? For example, if I do this 100 times, after 100 times or 100 days, I might be able to think quickly during voice memos and produce coherent speech. That’s the first point.

Second point—you see, it doesn’t allow me to think deeply either. The second point is this: I think with AI deeply involved in my work and life, my work style needs to change. I once thought I could completely detach from code and become a so-called CEO or president who only handles the higher level. But now I’m starting to believe that AI is not yet capable of taking on that role—building the entire organizational structure.

On one hand, maybe I haven’t tuned AI well enough. On the other hand, I think my mind needs to stay sharp to be that “president,” and the act of thinking about “what I really want” cannot be replaced by AI. Otherwise, I’ll only get more and more chaos. Because when I output one sentence, AI outputs ten, even things I hadn’t thought of. I might think “this is good, that is good too,” and cumulative errors creep in. After a series of prompts, when I’ve been vibe coding all day, I might get something surprising and exciting; but if I’m trying to do serious engineering, I’ll most likely end up with something different from what I initially wanted.

I might even question whether my initial idea was clear, or whether I was just wasting resources (tokens) on a naive idea. So vibe coding hasn’t made things easier for me; it’s made the pressure to think heavier.

But physically, vibe coding does make things easier. Why? Because I no longer need to spend a lot of time manually typing. I can, or rather I’m forced to, handle my time more fragmented. Working in three contexts simultaneously, my work pattern might become: wake up, eat breakfast, write a prompt and let AI work; while it works, I go exercise; around noon, come back to check the results and give new instructions. This process requires me to be agile and sharp enough to give precise instructions. Then I leave the computer again to eat, or switch to another context and give instructions to the next AI team, and repeat. That’s how my day goes.

But I find my energy is limited. So while I idealize this, I might end up slacking off after issuing prompts—watching Bilibili, watching videos, thinking about random things. My mind doesn’t become sharper during that time; I don’t generate further thoughts about what the AI is about to work on. The feedback loop isn’t established.

I think CZ has a very good trait: he re-ingests past work and AI outputs, forming a complete feedback loop for his thinking, then iterates. After repeatedly examining myself, I might find that my loop is open—that is, I don’t re-digest what I’ve output before, or I don’t rethink. This cuts off the depth of my thinking at that level, and I need to avoid that.

If I don’t think, one day I’ll be forced to face a lot of these things. Maybe it’s a bug or failure I can’t understand, maybe it’s someone else’s questioning that reveals I haven’t grasped the concept deeply enough. In short, I think this needs to change.

Third point, I want to talk about something specific—the Signal Trader I’ve been working on lately. I find it different from my other vibe coding projects; working on it often makes me uncomfortable. This discomfort might stem from not fully understanding the requirements, or not fully grasping them. This overlaps with the second point I just mentioned. That is, I haven’t carefully chewed over what the design should be.

Moreover, I don’t have an easy way to verify if the code generated by AI is correct or missing things. Because I’ve repeatedly found that when I ask AI to check its own work, it always thinks it’s pretty much done. But when I drill down on a specific detail, it tells me, “Oh, that part isn’t actually implemented yet, only the interface is left.” So I can’t exhaustively probe like that.

I think a better approach is to design all the use cases, have the AI explain them, and then judge whether the work is complete. There are usually two ways to check completion: white-box (seeing how it’s done) or black-box testing. In this case, I should ideally see the code, but since I can’t fully review it (and I even hope not to, to scale myself), I should adopt black-box testing. That might be the missing piece: convenient testing.

This might also be why I recently started giving Yuan early access to AI—my subconscious knew what was making me uncomfortable, but it didn’t surface until I wrote this log today.

While talking about this, I thought of something else, but it slipped away. I’ll let it go for now.

I want to say that recently I’ve been distracted by other things, feeling a bit overwhelmed, feeling pressure from other matters. But the good thing is that emotionally I’m not crushed. I feel the workload, not emotional flooding. I think that’s a positive change. I believe all this will pass and end with a good conclusion and transition. I think the future is still bright and hopeful.

OK, next question. I think I had another topic I wanted to discuss. Yes, re-establishing my personal OKRs. At the beginning of March, I planned to do this practice after the Chinese New Year, but I was interrupted by a series of events and it’s been delayed until now. I think the delay doesn’t mean it should be canceled, so I plan to pick up the OKR stuff again soon. Especially after AI has freed up some of my productivity, focus becomes even more important.

I believe the underlying motivation is: if a person can work persistently in one direction, they can achieve something. The worst is going back and forth, like time is a dog walker and I’m the dog, running back and forth, forward and back. When the walker has only walked one kilometer, I might have walked four. That shouldn’t be the case.

I want to talk about what these OKRs might include. I briefly listed some before, but not on my phone. Probably the first point is work-related, specifically quantitative stuff—I want to improve position management. Second, I’ll continue to make engineering improvements, including opening Yuan to AI agents, and possibly optimizing and refactoring some existing components with other technologies. Third, I might want to help my teammates and companions with model development. Fourth, there’s an entrepreneurial practice related to AI Agent OPC, which I’ll work closely with CZ on.

That’s for work. The overall goal is to make some money within this year.

Second, family and life. My life is about to enter a next phase, maybe faster than I expected. I’ll face it calmly, accept it joyfully, and pave a path for our future. The difference is that when it was just me, my life goals and priorities were one thing. For me, training my mind and expanding my horizons were primary; wealth and career success were secondary. That’s why SY always says I’m not that motivated to earn money.

But if we assume starting a family, the priority of economic improvement and career success rises significantly. The urgency and importance increase. I don’t see this as a burden, but as something thrilling. So I think I’ll handle it well.

Third, to maintain my mental stability, I need to make adjustments in my daily life. For example, having an offline work session with CZ once a week, or doing boxing, exercise. I’ve found that staying alone in the room for a long time makes my spirit wilt. Having outdoor activities or even just seeing other people without deep conversation is beneficial and helpful.

Positive life: these two major aspects, plus a minor aspect of improving my mental state. These three goals should be what I strive for in the next six months to a year. I’ll then break them down into what needs to be done in Q2.

At first I thought I had nothing to say, but suddenly I’ve been talking for 20 minutes, so it’s more than I expected. I’ll later organize this voice into written log entries, and in that process, try not to let AI extract the main points for me. I think that’s a necessary foundation for my existence as a human.

Alright, I’m going to end this voice recording in 5 seconds. 3, 2, 1. Goodbye.