Thoughts

Form is the medium — it decides what users and readers actually see. On WeChat, people look at the image and read the post body; on Video Accounts, people watch the video and largely skip the text.

Different platforms also mean different things behind the scenes: different moderation rules, different traffic distribution, different audiences.

It is only after I started making content for commercialization and product launches that these ideas became concrete. Before, I knew the big concepts — but did not really know them.

知行合一 (the unity of knowing and doing) — it feels something like this.

These days, building a 50-point demo with AI may only take half a day, or even an hour or two. But from 50 to 80, there is often a huge chasm.

Most of the time, shipping a 50-point demo does not prove much. Shortening the distance from 50 to 80 — delivering a product experience and service with the highest completeness you can — is what matters.

Of course, if you have already found your target users and a business model with a 50-point product, that is also fine. Knowing exactly what level of product you are aiming for matters a lot.

Image generated with GPT-image-2.

Vibe coding has a common detour: you ship the demo first, skip the thinking and research along the way, and just keep asking the AI to tweak it.

But sometimes it pays to stop and look at how reference products solve the same thing — how others handle the same kind of problem. It saves you a lot of dead ends.

Written after hitting a few of these while building ColorWander.

Two recent thoughts:

1. Ideas are easy to copy. Completeness and details are not. Marketing and distribution channels are not. The data and corpus you have accumulated cannot be caught up with overnight either. Spinning up a demo has never been easier — everyone can say "I just vibe-coded a XYZ." But shipping a product with a complete experience is hard. Getting 100, 1,000, or more people to actually use what you offer is hard.

2. A friend told me: "All the friends I know who used to build productivity tools — none of them want to build pure productivity anymore." I said: "I think it is a stage thing. The more optimistic you are about model and agent capabilities, the deeper you go, the more pessimistic you become about pure productivity, and the more you care about things that are playful, fun, and human." I genuinely believe that.

Building products that are fun and humane matters more and more.

I have been moving some of my dev tasks onto Codex lately, and I keep feeling it: a complete toolchain (calling image-gen APIs directly, reading markdown natively, clean integrations with all kinds of tools), a reliable user experience (highly visual), plus a GPT-5.5 brain that is back on its feet — it is genuinely good to use.

Each player leads for a month or two. OpenAI is back. No one gets to say they will lead forever, and never underestimate a strong player's determination to take a market.

As a tool user in this era, there is no good reason to lock yourself into one tool out of loyalty or habit. Whatever works best, whatever is more advanced — just use it.

One more thing: avoid free tiers and cheap substitutes — cheap things are always the most expensive.

When I build products, I think about running.

1. The core of long-termism is to stay on the track — to finish the marathon with a calm, positive, and self-paced mindset.
2. Building a product often feels confusing at the first step. Dive in, and you start to collect unexpected little surprises. Get close to the finish line, and you realize the details multiply fast. From there on, it is all about polishing — the devil is in the details, and they decide whether your product earns real affection.
3. The real source of calm is believing you can finish this marathon, and that you can hit your own PB (Personal Best) at a comfortable pace.

ClawPuter officially crossed 100 GitHub stars today. I just kept shipping casually, and the milestone quietly arrived on its own.

It is the first project I built from zero to one that reached three digits on GitHub. Just a number, but worth marking down as a small personal milestone.

A recent reflection: I am not a fan of chasing best practices, which makes me move too fast and step on avoidable landmines — especially on procedural stuff. Two examples, for future me to remember:

1. Google AdSense account: I moved too fast and filled in Hong Kong details, but I don't actually have a Hong Kong mailing address. The consequence is that I may not be able to cash out ad revenue later. After asking around in a group chat, my only option was to close the account, and I am not sure whether a re-application will be blocked.
2. Domain registration: too fast, and too cheap — I grabbed a .cc domain. Only later, when doing SEO, did I realize: WTF, the sitemap does not get auto-indexed, and a bunch of other quirks come with it.

When validating an idea, moving fast matters. But when there is already a standard, an SOP, or an industry best practice, just follow it. It is the least painful path and saves you from countless detours.

When in doubt, ask friends, group chats, or folks who have been there. Opening your mouth is sometimes more valuable than opening your editor.

This X post got a small burst of attention this afternoon. The numbers are not huge, but it is already my best-performing post ever.

Publishing really is more important than perfecting. Before posting, I was still thinking: maybe I should wait, record an English walkthrough video, and then publish it. But it was almost dinner time and I needed to cook, so I just posted an image thread with English captions and a Chinese demo voiceover.

And that was enough to get this result.

Next time I hesitate, I need to repeat this to myself: ship it first.

For infrastructure-level tools, just pay for them. Don't waste time wrestling with free alternatives. Learned this lesson the hard way today — spent two hours trying three free iOS proxy clients before a $2.99 Shadowrocket purchase solved everything in 30 seconds.

The most expensive cost is never the tool's price. It's the time you spend trying to avoid paying it.

Full write-up: iOS Proxy Client Pitfalls

Read a friend's essay from three years ago about their hackathon experience. I can't remember what I felt the first time I read it, but re-reading it last night, a few things stood out:

The technical parts have changed incredibly fast. Some of the stuff I didn't fully get three years ago now feels like ancient history.

But what hasn't changed are the product insights — the walks, the background music, the human touches. I still think about those ideas from time to time.

Also, it's wild to think that what six people spent 48 hours building back then could probably be done by one person in an hour today.

A great essay. People should write more. Even if you're not writing history, leaving a small trace of yourself in the human timeline is worth something.

I keep talking about the product loop these past few weeks. One real benefit of closing that loop is that data forces you to either fully let go or pivot. Without it, you always hold onto false hope.

Ten years since Kobe's farewell game. I was a senior in college, watching it in the lab. Time flies — another decade gone, and the league scheduled Lakers vs Jazz as the last regular season game this year.

Before bed, I watched "The Bucket List" with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Nicholson is a die-hard Lakers and Kobe fan.

Everyone has their own understanding of journaling and personal growth. Late at night I stumbled upon a design I really love, and some ideas suddenly clicked.

Drift

A small, arguably useless milestone: after a few PRs, my avatar now sits alongside Peter — the creator of OpenClaw — in the Contributors section of his other open-source project, CodexBar.

The logic of GitHub PRs has actually changed in the AI era. When I contribute to open-source projects, I just fix bugs that I find basic and annoying, purely from a user's perspective.

The code I contribute might be messy (it's not even mine — my Agent writes it, and I just do what a user and product manager should do). But before my messy code arrived, the existing logic wasn't exactly clean either.

All I want to do is contribute from the user's point of view, as best I can.

The moment I felt AI truly gets me — this screenshot says it all. While writing my weekly plan, it warned me:

• Don't do this week: any new side projects (all frozen), bryantchen.cc feature development (RSS is done, enough), offline social events (unless they directly bring paying users)

• One-line goal: 23 days until the end of April. The only thing this week is to get real users actually using MemoryX

It really gets me.

Building products in the AI era has a sufficient but not necessary condition: from day one, you probably need to think about how to create a “product spectacle.”

A product spectacle isn't always something you can plan for, but if you don't think about it from day one, it definitely won't exist. And if, after building a product, you feel it's hard to create that spectacle, it's very likely it won't succeed or go viral.

Seeing a friend’s project get reverse engineered and then open-sourced on GitHub made me realize build in public has changed. You now have to ship with a relatively high level of completeness, market it, and sell it. Otherwise you’re in a passive position. Also, stay close to your real users and stay away from developers.

The minimum viable loop of a commercial product is what "development complete" actually means. That loop is: a working demo, basic login, basic payment and subscription, and a website. Launch it, run a beta, get at least one paying user. That's the minimum viable loop.

Anything less doesn't count.

What is a one-person company really pursuing?

People have been asking me this a lot lately. My answer right now is simple: first, freedom; second, the ability to generate your own cash flow and truly take responsibility for outcomes. Don’t just entertain yourself. Build products people are actually willing to pay for, and form a complete business loop.

Another question I’ve been sitting with recently is this: what kinds of entry points are actually suitable for a small team or a one-person company? And which directions are really just good stories, but not a fit for a company at my stage? Once you think that through, a lot of things become naturally clearer.

Run through PMF as early as possible. Keep going.

When you realize a product's form factor feels wrong, should you cut your losses immediately or struggle with it a bit longer? I've been thinking about this recently.

Since becoming an indie developer, the most frustrating part is that "Vibe Coding" easily dilutes your focus as a product manager. You end up spending too much time just building and rushing to ship. I need to stay vigilant about this: building a product must start with capturing real user needs and defining a differentiated experience. Always remember the "424 rule" for time allocation: 40% finding needs + 20% development + 40% marketing. Don't get the priorities backward.

Rewatching Jia Zhangke's "Mountains May Depart" on Sunday night. His imagination for electronic devices in 2025 was transparent liquid glass, though the GUI still felt stuck in 2014. It has to be said: the hardware of 2025 we imagined hasn't quite arrived, but software has vastly exceeded human imagination. Ordinary people often underestimate the development of software while overestimating the advancement of hardware.

I'm slowly accepting something:

You don't have to put a whole big product in front of the world for it to count as shipping.

For me, MemoryX may have already missed its best moment to be launched as a complete product.
But that doesn't mean what's inside it has no value.

A more realistic path might be to ship the extension first.
Let a smaller, more specific slice meet the world and collect real signals.

Sometimes shipping isn't about telling the whole story at once.
It's about giving the world the part that feels the most alive first.

A few recent moments have helped me understand why, if you create content, you need to publish across multiple platforms. It seems like common sense, but human nature — mainly laziness and indifference toward certain platforms — makes us overlook this:

1. Traffic rules on any single platform are essentially random events. Take Xiaohongshu (RED) for example — as a beginner, it's really hard to figure out what gets traction and what doesn't. But as a creator, ignore the randomness of metrics. Just share sincerely, be genuinely helpful, and stick to those principles. Content produced this way might flop on Platform A but take off on Platform B.

A concrete example: I recently shared ClawPuter's Build in Public content. The first four episodes did great on Xiaohongshu, but episode five — where I put extra effort into the cover design and edited with CapCut — got zero traction. What I didn't expect was that WeChat Stickers' recommendation algorithm gave this episode a ton of traffic over the past two days. This is what they call "when the east doesn't shine, the west will."

2. Behind multi-platform publishing, there's another reason: if you're making good content, when you don't publish it somewhere, someone else might repost or remix it. If you don't publish, someone else will. Rather than watching your metrics get claimed by others, it's worth casually posting on other platforms too. Sure, your original content might perform worse than someone else's remix. But you won't know unless you try.

The above is purely a beginner's practical sharing — take it with a grain of salt.

The most resonant article I've read recently is Eric Xu's "In 2016, I did an AI coding startup" https://x.com/xleaps/status/2033027083476054377. I actually read it a few weeks ago, but today I read it carefully again, and it's the kind of piece where I kept highlighting text. As a Silicon Valley founder, Eric shared this observation:

"Seeing the future ≠ Arriving at the future." In life and work, there are always three kinds of mismatches: "Having vision without resources, having resources without direction, having contributions without self-awareness."

Most of the time, we don't even know which position we are in. Anxiety is the underlying tone for founders, but it never generates signals; only action generates signals. After seeing this sentence, I changed it to my pinned WeChat signature.

Replace deduction and anxiety with proactive action. Within the boundaries you can currently see, try your best to make choices that do justice to yourself. Thus have I heard.

Building a personal website has been on my mind for years. I kept putting it off — never enough time, not enough skills, and even after buying my domain back in 2022, it still never went live. But this time was different. One evening, I opened a terminal, had a quick chat with AI, and my site was up. Thanks to good context management habits, the content architecture came together fast too. Hello, whoever you are visiting my little corner of the internet — here I'll be sharing my thoughts, projects, and growth. Thanks for stopping by!