AI Explorer
Ruohang Feng @Vonng / Agent, LLM, Database
Everything about AI, agents, LLMs, vibe coding, AI4DB and DB4AI.
Cyber Dharma: A New Engineering Answer to Ancient Questions
A project manifesto: why build Cyber Dharma, and what it is not.
Burning Hundreds of Millions of Tokens a Day. Then What?
Once token burn turns from usage exhaust into a KPI and leaderboard, it quickly mutates into theater. Don't post fuel burn. Post where you got to.
Why PostgreSQL Won in the AI Era
Boring technology won the wildest era. A look at extensibility, agent choice, database cloning, and the future of the DBA.
AGI Is Here. Do You Have a Ticket?
When the strongest AI is not expensive but simply unavailable, the world starts converging on digital feudalism. And the window to act is narrowing.
Can You Distill an Expert?
Polanyi's tacit knowledge explains the 70% ceiling of AI agents: real intuition, feel, and judgment do not serialize cleanly. They grow, if at all, through practice.
Yes, I Use AI to Write
AI is a multiplier. It amplifies depth and mediocrity alike. In an age where answers are cheap, questions are the real currency. There is nothing to hide about writing with AI.
Local AI's Inflection Point: 2027
When subsidies fade, hardware catches up, and open models mature, all three lines cross in 2027. "Build your own AI" goes from idea to reality.
LLMs Have Emotions: Claude's Internals Reveal Steerable 'Emotion Vectors'
Anthropic's new research gives us the first direct look at causally steerable "emotion vectors" inside a large language model. That should change how we think about AI.
Good News: Claude Code Got "Open-Sourced" Yet Again
SOTA coding agent Claude Code leaked its source again, after falling into the same hole twice. The whole codebase is out in public. Performance art at its finest.
The Nature of Intelligence: The Free Energy Principle
The free energy principle tries to explain life, perception, learning, action, and intelligence within one mathematical framework. It also offers a deeper lens for understanding LLMs, agents, and the …
Why 'Vibe Coding' Should Be Translated as 'Xieyi Programming'
The best Chinese translation of "Vibe Coding" is not a literal one. "Xieyi Programming" captures the shift from line-by-line control to intent-first coding, where AI handles the details.
AI Survival Guide: Where the Biggest Arbitrage Really Is
The biggest AI arbitrage available to ordinary users is not some obscure token play. It is the heavily subsidized max-tier subscription plans from frontier model vendors, provided you can convert that …
AI Says: I Have Intelligence, But Not a Life
A Socratic dialogue between a human and an AI about consciousness, memory, embodiment, and the difference between being smart and actually living through time.
OpenClaw Hype: Foam on Top of the Productivity Revolution
OpenClaw looks exciting because it turns agents into a chat-style experience. But the real productivity gains come from high-capability subscription agents and disciplined workflows, not from …
AI Was the Excuse for 4,000 Layoffs. Software Engineer Hiring Rose 11%
AI is becoming the story companies tell when they lay people off, but total demand for software engineering has not disappeared. It is spreading across the wider economy, driven by second-order demand …
How Much Can One Person Get Done with AI over Spring Festival?
Over roughly ten days during Spring Festival, I used Claude Code, Codex, and a pile of workflows to translate books, ship releases, package software, refresh websites, and keep publishing daily. This …
AI Through McLuhan's Lens: When Media Stop Extending the Body and Start Extending the Mind
McLuhan's "the medium is the message," extension and amputation, hot and cool media, rear-view mirror effect, and four laws of media offer a way to dissect AI and its deeper effects on our cognitive …
A New Year—and What AI Will Change
AI is reshaping knowledge work far faster than historical experience would suggest. The real challenge is not whether you know how to use AI, but whether you can retool your thinking and skills before …
When Coding Becomes Cheap, What Still Matters?
Codex 5.3 xHigh pushed my workflow past a tipping point: writing code is no longer the scarce resource. The real leverage is design quality and engineering acceptance. This is the practical loop I use …
The Agent Moat: Runtime
A mediocre local who knows the terrain beats a genius parachuted into unknown territory. Intelligence without context is idle. An agent without a runtime is vapor.
AI Ripped the Skin Off Software
Software stocks are melting down. Who survives? Who rises? AI stripped away software's skin, exposing the database skeleton underneath. The market isn't panic-selling — it's repricing.
New Programmers in the AI Era: Where Do You Go?
Should we still hire fresh grads? Squeezed between AI and senior devs, what's the play for new programmers? Master the right tools, take initiative, find the right mentor.
The Great Software Meltdown: When Translation Layers Get Squashed
SaaS and workflow software are dead. From APPs & GUIs to Agents, Databases, and CLI.
Don't run AI assistant on cloud
When launch clawdbot on the cloud, you're handing over cognitive data to the vendor. There's a reason why people by Mac mini rather than running clawdbot on the cloud.
Cyber Dharma: A New Engineering Answer to Ancient Questions
Have you ever noticed that writing a System Prompt for AI, something as simple as “You are Claude, a helpful AI assistant” is structurally the same act as the line in Genesis, “Let there be light”? Both use language to bring an entity into being. …
Have you ever noticed that writing a System Prompt for AI, something as simple as “You are Claude, a helpful AI assistant” is structurally the same act as the line in Genesis, “Let there be light”? Both use language to bring an entity into being. …
Burning Hundreds of Millions of Tokens a Day. Then What?
My friend Jiang recently got obsessed with flexing in group chat about burning hundreds of millions of tokens a day. What was he doing with them? One minute it was some ontology database, the next he had an agent rebuilding Pigsty in Go under the …
My friend Jiang recently got obsessed with flexing in group chat about burning hundreds of millions of tokens a day. What was he doing with them? One minute it was some ontology database, the next he had an agent rebuilding Pigsty in Go under the …
Why PostgreSQL Won in the AI Era
I recently did a recorded livestream on PostgreSQL and AI. The host asked a lot of good questions, and I gave some answers. The recording goes out Tuesday night. I am publishing the fuller written version of my views here, including quite a bit I did …
I recently did a recorded livestream on PostgreSQL and AI. The host asked a lot of good questions, and I gave some answers. The recording goes out Tuesday night. I am publishing the fuller written version of my views here, including quite a bit I did …
AGI Is Here. Do You Have a Ticket?
On April 8, 2026, Marc Andreessen posted a tweet that, translated loosely, said: The latest AGI pricing is out: if you are one of 11 specific companies, the price is negative $9 million. Otherwise, the price is infinity. Negative $9 million means not …
On April 8, 2026, Marc Andreessen posted a tweet that, translated loosely, said: The latest AGI pricing is out: if you are one of 11 specific companies, the price is negative $9 million. Otherwise, the price is infinity. Negative $9 million means not …
Can You Distill an Expert?
Polanyi’s tacit knowledge explains the 70% ceiling of AI agents: real intuition, feel, and judgment do not serialize cleanly. They grow, if at all, through practice. 1. Distilling Employees A popular idea lately is to “distill” employee knowledge …
Polanyi’s tacit knowledge explains the 70% ceiling of AI agents: real intuition, feel, and judgment do not serialize cleanly. They grow, if at all, through practice. 1. Distilling Employees A popular idea lately is to “distill” employee knowledge …
Yes, I Use AI to Write
People often leave the same short comment under my posts: “AI wrote this.” Correct. I use AI, and I use it heavily. I do not think there is anything to hide there. But the topic itself is worth addressing seriously at least once: how should a person …
People often leave the same short comment under my posts: “AI wrote this.” Correct. I use AI, and I use it heavily. I do not think there is anything to hide there. But the topic itself is worth addressing seriously at least once: how should a person …
Local AI's Inflection Point: 2027
When subsidies fade, hardware catches up, and open models mature, all three lines cross in 2027. “Build your own AI” goes from idea to reality. A Thought Triggered by a Group Chat A friend in a group chat said the other day that “self-hosting” is …
When subsidies fade, hardware catches up, and open models mature, all three lines cross in 2027. “Build your own AI” goes from idea to reality. A Thought Triggered by a Group Chat A friend in a group chat said the other day that “self-hosting” is …
LLMs Have Emotions: Claude's Internals Reveal Steerable 'Emotion Vectors'
A couple of days ago Anthropic published a blog post with a very calm title: “Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model”. The content was anything but calm. They found “emotion vectors” inside Claude’s neural network, and those …
A couple of days ago Anthropic published a blog post with a very calm title: “Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model”. The content was anything but calm. They found “emotion vectors” inside Claude’s neural network, and those …
Good News: Claude Code Got "Open-Sourced" Yet Again
Good news: Anthropic’s latest flagship coding agent, Claude Code, just had its entire source tree dumped in public. The GitHub repo already has over a thousand stars, 4,700-plus source files, and more than half a million lines of code, all for free. …
Good news: Anthropic’s latest flagship coding agent, Claude Code, just had its entire source tree dumped in public. The GitHub repo already has over a thousand stars, 4,700-plus source files, and more than half a million lines of code, all for free. …
The Nature of Intelligence: The Free Energy Principle
I saw someone say the other day: “The point of life is to predict the future.” That sounds plausible at first, but I think it gets the direction backwards. Prediction is not the goal. Staying alive is. So the better statement is: we stay alive by …
I saw someone say the other day: “The point of life is to predict the future.” That sounds plausible at first, but I think it gets the direction backwards. Prediction is not the goal. Staying alive is. So the better statement is: we stay alive by …
Why 'Vibe Coding' Should Be Translated as 'Xieyi Programming'
Last year Andrej Karpathy coined the term “Vibe Coding.” The rough idea is simple: you tell the AI what you want, it spits out code, you skim it, decide it looks close enough, and move on. The term spread quickly because it captures something real. …
Last year Andrej Karpathy coined the term “Vibe Coding.” The rough idea is simple: you tell the AI what you want, it spits out code, you skim it, decide it looks close enough, and move on. The term spread quickly because it captures something real. …
AI Survival Guide: Where the Biggest Arbitrage Really Is
It is not every day that you pay one dollar and receive fifty dollars’ worth of compute in return. But that is more or less what frontier AI subscriptions look like right now. 1. Paying $200 and burning $5,000 of compute Recent reporting cited …
It is not every day that you pay one dollar and receive fifty dollars’ worth of compute in return. But that is more or less what frontier AI subscriptions look like right now. 1. Paying $200 and burning $5,000 of compute Recent reporting cited …
AI Says: I Have Intelligence, But Not a Life
Adapted from a real conversation between Vonng and Claude. Prologue: a fruit fly starts a philosophy problem The discussion began with a striking piece of news: Eon Systems reportedly loaded the full connectome of a fruit-fly brain into a computer, …
Adapted from a real conversation between Vonng and Claude. Prologue: a fruit fly starts a philosophy problem The discussion began with a striking piece of news: Eon Systems reportedly loaded the full connectome of a fruit-fly brain into a computer, …
OpenClaw Hype: Foam on Top of the Productivity Revolution
OpenClaw became popular because it gives people a very attractive illusion: that chatting with an agent from a phone is already the same thing as agentic productivity. It is not. The stories about “raising a lobster and changing your life” are …
OpenClaw became popular because it gives people a very attractive illusion: that chatting with an agent from a phone is already the same thing as agentic productivity. It is not. The stories about “raising a lobster and changing your life” are …
AI Was the Excuse for 4,000 Layoffs. Software Engineer Hiring Rose 11%
Yesterday brought a bombshell. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 40% of its staff in one stroke. More than 4,000 people are leaving, shrinking the workforce from over 10,000 to fewer than 6,000. The explanation, of course, was AI. Dorsey went …
Yesterday brought a bombshell. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 40% of its staff in one stroke. More than 4,000 people are leaving, shrinking the workforce from over 10,000 to fewer than 6,000. The explanation, of course, was AI. Dorsey went …
How Much Can One Person Get Done with AI over Spring Festival?
Once the public holiday ended and work officially resumed, I realized I had effectively been working through most of Spring Festival anyway. From February 13 to February 23, I translated two O’Reilly books, wrote ten WeChat posts, forked MinIO, …
Once the public holiday ended and work officially resumed, I realized I had effectively been working through most of Spring Festival anyway. From February 13 to February 23, I translated two O’Reilly books, wrote ten WeChat posts, forked MinIO, …
AI Through McLuhan's Lens: When Media Stop Extending the Body and Start Extending the Mind
Notion founder Ivan Zhao recently wrote a widely circulated essay, Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds, using the Industrial Revolution as a metaphor for AI: AI gives us “infinite minds” and will fundamentally reshape the structure of knowledge work. …
Notion founder Ivan Zhao recently wrote a widely circulated essay, Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds, using the Industrial Revolution as a metaphor for AI: AI gives us “infinite minds” and will fundamentally reshape the structure of knowledge work. …
A New Year—and What AI Will Change
Original WeChat post For this generation of knowledge workers, the greatest danger is not that they “don’t know how to use AI.” It is that they still think they have a 20-year adjustment window. They don’t. We may be the first generation of …
Original WeChat post For this generation of knowledge workers, the greatest danger is not that they “don’t know how to use AI.” It is that they still think they have a 20-year adjustment window. They don’t. We may be the first generation of …
When Coding Becomes Cheap, What Still Matters?
I did not publish much last week because I was busy stress-testing OpenAI Codex 3 xHigh. With temporary double quota, I burned almost the full $200 budget running parallel sessions across more than ten Pigsty subprojects: core repo, CN/EN docs, blog, …
I did not publish much last week because I was busy stress-testing OpenAI Codex 3 xHigh. With temporary double quota, I burned almost the full $200 budget running parallel sessions across more than ten Pigsty subprojects: core repo, CN/EN docs, blog, …
The Agent Moat: Runtime
3 AM. Database alerts are blowing up. You throw the alert info at a “top-tier” DBA Agent. It’s well-read — knows the PostgreSQL docs inside out, writes beautiful diagnostic SQL, can recite every kernel parameter from memory. It freezes: What’s the …
3 AM. Database alerts are blowing up. You throw the alert info at a “top-tier” DBA Agent. It’s well-read — knows the PostgreSQL docs inside out, writes beautiful diagnostic SQL, can recite every kernel parameter from memory. It freezes: What’s the …
AI Ripped the Skin Off Software
AI stripped away software’s skin, exposing the database skeleton underneath. The market isn’t panic-selling — it’s repricing. I. The Bloodbath Software stocks are experiencing a historic meltdown. In January 2026, the iShares Software ETF (IGV) …
AI stripped away software’s skin, exposing the database skeleton underneath. The market isn’t panic-selling — it’s repricing. I. The Bloodbath Software stocks are experiencing a historic meltdown. In January 2026, the iShares Software ETF (IGV) …
New Programmers in the AI Era: Where Do You Go?
The Window Is Closing Recently I was chatting with a few friends in tech, and we landed on a question that silenced everyone: “Should we still hire fresh grads?” Nobody could answer. Not because they didn’t want to — because they didn’t dare. AI …
The Window Is Closing Recently I was chatting with a few friends in tech, and we landed on a question that silenced everyone: “Should we still hire fresh grads?” Nobody could answer. Not because they didn’t want to — because they didn’t dare. AI …
The Great Software Meltdown: When Translation Layers Get Squashed
I. The Great Software Meltdown The software world is witnessing an epic valuation collapse. This isn’t about individual companies tanking. This is a systemic implosion of the entire SaaS sector. Wall Street is voting with real money: these software …
I. The Great Software Meltdown The software world is witnessing an epic valuation collapse. This isn’t about individual companies tanking. This is a systemic implosion of the entire SaaS sector. Wall Street is voting with real money: these software …
Don't run AI assistant on cloud
Before you hit “one-click deploy” on that cloud AI assistant, ask yourself: what exactly are you giving up? There’s a reason why people by Mac mini rather than running clawdbot on the cloud. When AI Becomes Your Butler Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) …
Before you hit “one-click deploy” on that cloud AI assistant, ask yourself: what exactly are you giving up? There’s a reason why people by Mac mini rather than running clawdbot on the cloud. When AI Becomes Your Butler Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) …