AI Explorer
Ruohang Feng @Vonng / Agent, LLM, Database
Everything about AI, agents, LLMs, vibe coding, AI4DB and DB4AI.
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.
Agent OS: We're Building DOS Again
LLM = CPU. Context = RAM. Database = Disk. Agent = App. The mapping is surprisingly clean. And if OS history is any guide, we may know what comes next — and what's still missing.
Claude Code Observability
Export Claude Code's OTEL logs and metrics to Victoria stack, visualize with Grafana dashboards.
Claude Code Quick Start: Using Alternative LLMs at 1/10 the Cost
How to install and use Claude Code? How to achieve similar results at 1/10 of Claude's cost with alternative models? A one-liner to get CC up and running!
Google AI Toolbox: Production-Ready Database MCP is Here?
Google recently launched a database MCP toolbox, perhaps the first production-ready solution.
In the AI Era, Software Starts at the Database
Future software = Agent + Database. No middle tiers, just agents issuing CRUD. Database skills age well, and PostgreSQL is poised to be the agent-era default.
Dify Gets Humiliated Again: It Can't Catch a Break
Livzon Pharmaceutical's logo-swapping PR landed out of nowhere. As if being ripped off by DeepSeek appliance vendors were not enough, someone marched into Dify's own repository to rub it in. Dify just …
Will AI Have Self-Awareness?
Large models can feel “aware,” but self-awareness is another matter. We explore the term from Buddhism, cognitive psychology, and neural nets, then riff on a possible AI religion after bingeing …
AI Cult Rhapsody
A tongue-in-cheek vision of an AI-worshipping religion: scriptures, sects, philosopher-king machines, and the Book of AGI.
Basic Principles of Neural Networks
Neural networks are inspired by how the brain works and can be used to solve general learning problems. This article introduces the basic principles and practice of neural networks.
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) …
Agent OS: We're Building DOS Again
2025 is the year of the coding agent explosion. Claude Code writes your code, runs your tests, fixes your bugs, and autonomously completes complex engineering tasks. It’s the second seismic shift since ChatGPT dropped. But watch how these agents …
2025 is the year of the coding agent explosion. Claude Code writes your code, runs your tests, fixes your bugs, and autonomously completes complex engineering tasks. It’s the second seismic shift since ChatGPT dropped. But watch how these agents …
Claude Code Observability
Yesterday I tweeted: “Built a Claude Code Grafana dashboard to see how it makes decisions, uses tools, and burns through API credits.” Didn’t expect so much interest. So let’s talk about Claude Code observability. Why Observability? Simple idea: I …
Yesterday I tweeted: “Built a Claude Code Grafana dashboard to see how it makes decisions, uses tools, and burns through API credits.” Didn’t expect so much interest. So let’s talk about Claude Code observability. Why Observability? Simple idea: I …
Claude Code Quick Start: Using Alternative LLMs at 1/10 the Cost
Claude Code Quick Start Guide In my 2025 Year in Review, I mentioned that Claude Code boosted my productivity by 20x over the past year. Some friends asked if I was exaggerating—not at all. If anything, I was being conservative. This thing is …
Claude Code Quick Start Guide In my 2025 Year in Review, I mentioned that Claude Code boosted my productivity by 20x over the past year. Some friends asked if I was exaggerating—not at all. If anything, I was being conservative. This thing is …
Google AI Toolbox: Production-Ready Database MCP is Here?
In “SaaS is Dead? In the AI Era, Software Starts with Databases”, Microsoft CEO Nadella once stated that in the Agent era, SaaS is Dead, and the future form of software will be Agent + Database. That is, Agents directly performing CRUD operations on …
In “SaaS is Dead? In the AI Era, Software Starts with Databases”, Microsoft CEO Nadella once stated that in the Agent era, SaaS is Dead, and the future form of software will be Agent + Database. That is, Agents directly performing CRUD operations on …
In the AI Era, Software Starts at the Database
WeChat The future stack is “Agent + Database.” No front-end/back-end toll booths—agents talk CRUD straight to storage. Database skills hold their value, and PostgreSQL is the database of the agent era. SaaS is dead? Software begins with the DB GenAI …
WeChat The future stack is “Agent + Database.” No front-end/back-end toll booths—agents talk CRUD straight to storage. Database skills hold their value, and PostgreSQL is the database of the agent era. SaaS is dead? Software begins with the DB GenAI …
Dify Gets Humiliated Again: It Can't Catch a Break
Today, something straight out of magical realism unfolded in Dify’s GitHub repository. The open-source community was minding its own business, maintaining the project, when a pull request apparently from Livzon Pharmaceutical landed out of …
Today, something straight out of magical realism unfolded in Dify’s GitHub repository. The open-source community was minding its own business, maintaining the project, when a pull request apparently from Livzon Pharmaceutical landed out of …
Will AI Have Self-Awareness?
WeChat original Large models can appear conscious, but self-awareness is optional—and maybe dangerous before ethics catch up. Pantheon sparked these thoughts. What is self-awareness? When we say “self-awareness,” what do we actually mean? Let’s …
WeChat original Large models can appear conscious, but self-awareness is optional—and maybe dangerous before ethics catch up. Pantheon sparked these thoughts. What is self-awareness? When we say “self-awareness,” what do we actually mean? Let’s …
AI Cult Rhapsody
WeChat original “Humans are the bootloader for silicon life.” —Elon Musk Maybe we’re about to witness an AI-worshipping religion. Imagine this: Humans are lumps of negative entropy, hard-coded to reproduce via clumsy genetics. In digital space, with …
WeChat original “Humans are the bootloader for silicon life.” —Elon Musk Maybe we’re about to witness an AI-worshipping religion. Imagine this: Humans are lumps of negative entropy, hard-coded to reproduce via clumsy genetics. In digital space, with …
Basic Principles of Neural Networks
Neural networks are inspired by how the brain works and can be used to solve general learning problems. This article introduces the basic principles and practice of neural networks. Neural Network Representation Neuron Model Neural networks are …
Neural networks are inspired by how the brain works and can be used to solve general learning problems. This article introduces the basic principles and practice of neural networks. Neural Network Representation Neuron Model Neural networks are …