Recent content on Ben Cheng
I just had a day where I ran into bad AI usage pattern – four times. They are all non-code work. 
 So I’m writing this. 
 Core principle: don’t replace your judgment with AI. 
 In my last AI talk at Townhall – I said LLMs are probabilistic machines. They output tokens at certain probabilities, some correct, some wrong. That’s why we build harnesses in…

 Why AI Agents Might Finally Solve the Data Ownership Problem
 
 
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 Digital rights advocates have fought for data ownership for over thirty years. From proprietary file formats in the 1990s to SaaS platforms storing everything on remote servers, the pattern repeats: users create data, companies control it. 
 This matters beyond convenience. For…

 I Don’t Hate Writing, I Just Hate Editing
 
 
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 In high school, I scored A’s in Chinese and English for comprehension, oral, and listening. I got an F in writing. 
 This made no sense to me. I had ideas. I could articulate them in conversation. I understood what good writing looked like when I read it. But the moment I sat down to…

 AI Agents Are a New Form of Software
 
 
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 AI agents are the future of software. But not in the way most people think. 
 The current narrative: coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI are so good that the cost of building software is collapsing. Engineers ship in hours what used to take weeks. The build-vs-buy calculus is…

 Tech Ability Important in AI Era
 
 
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 The AI era just made technical ability matter again. And I mean for everyone, not just engineers. 
 Early days at Oursky, we used IRC and TWiki for internal comms. Worked great when the team was all techies. But as we grew and hired designers and business people, I pushed us to migrate to HipChat (later…

 Proving Code Works with Evidence
 
 
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 In 2026, engineering teams need to shift from “just ship code” to “ship code with proof.” 
 I’ve been hearing from friends across different companies: some junior engineers dumping AI-generated PRs on teammates and expecting code review to “handle the rest.” We…
The way Google handles the retirement of AI models is disappointing. 
 While I enjoy using Gemini 3 personally, the production workload of AI Agents requires stability, and model changes often lead to lower accuracy or broken workflows. 
 We have a lot of production workload on Gemini 2.0 – and I just got an email it will be retire by Mar 2026 
 This means we will need to re-run…

 Will AI Replace Software Developers? My take on the 2026 Landscape
 
 
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 Scrolling through social media, it’s hard to miss the debate: will AI make software developers obsolete in the next 5 years? As someone who’s spent over two decades in software engineering, developing AI/ML applications, I find the discussion fascinating, and…

 How AI Could Revolutionize Software QA
 
 
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 The conversation around AI in coding often focuses on boosting developer productivity—streamlining UI creation, writing infrastructure configs, and automating unit tests. But the area I believe AI will impact the most in software development is Quality Assurance (QA). 
 Here’s why: 
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I’ve noticed that in recent years, hardware specifications have become completely meaningless when it comes to product experience. 
 In 2023, I encountered two examples: AirPods Pro and the Steam Deck. 
 Let me start with the Steam Deck. Before getting the Steam Deck, I had purchased the ASUS ROG Ally, intending to play games on it. Maybe I would spend 15 minutes playing before going…
I’ve always enjoyed using iPhones since the first gen. I keep using 2 phones (iOS + Android) for a couple of years since I work in the mobile app industry and would prefer to stay up-to-date with features and experience on both platforms. Until recent years when I found the two platforms are too similar, and since I think the iOS UX and the app ecosystem are just so much better, I kept only…
Recently I found that I have switched almost all software I use daily personally, so thought it would be an interesting idea to share what software I use and why. 
 Here are what I have switched in a quick glance: 
 
 
 
 Type 
 2017 
 2022 
 
 
 
 
 Email 
 mutt 
 Superhuman 
 
 
 Notes 
 Evernote + Github (me repo) 
…
p.s. this is a GPT rewrite of a Facebook post of mine at 2020 
 As I look ahead to next year’s business challenges, I’m reflecting on my own background and path in the software industry. One thing I realized is, when I started up Oursky 10 years ago, 3 founders all with engineering backgrounds (we all graduated from CUHK with an Information Engineering degree), despite all the…
You can schedule a meeting with Ben Cheng as follows: 
 
 15 mins quick call over Google Meet 
 30 mins call over Google Meet 
 45 mins meeting at Oursky HK Office 
 Lunch at Workday 

My day job is running SkyMakers Digital , with teams in Hong Kong,
Taipei, London and Canada. I live mostly in Taipei and Hong Kong. 
 We are driven by developers and technologies, value craftsmanship, and socially progressive. 
 Our mission is to build open source solutions to help corporate in digital transformation and help developers build secure and privacy-aware software. 
…
Following are a foreword I wrote for a Software Project Mangement book in Chinese 
 
 軟件專案管理 推薦序
 
 
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 作為軟件技術背景的創業者，當初營運公司時，並沒有認為專案管理很重要。注意力集中在精進軟件工程技術水
平，甚至有專案管理員戲稱在公司的職責是"Keep Developers Happy"。 
 直到一次有位好朋友找我的團隊處理一個技術專案，處理Microservices 架構，理應價值在技術經驗。可是半年後
他卻告訴我，對他的技術團隊來說，整個案子最珍貴的部分，是我們的專案管理而不是技術，這才讓我第一次考
慮到專案管理的重要性。 
…

 My Pixelbook + 27 4K mon setup 
 
 

 
 Some background…
 
 
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 I have been using Macbook Air/Pro as my everyday computer for 10 years (prior to that was Gentoo Linux for 7 years), but in recent years the hardware quality and sluggishness of MacOS made me consider to switch back to Linux. 
 Until I read about…
So it is two weeks after using the Gemini Phone as my work phone and I would love to write a review on what it’s like using a PDA phone in 2018. 
 Gemini is an Android phone with the Psion 5 keyboard (at least that was how it marketed). As a keyboard lover (I used the Palm Treo for a long time, loved the Blackberry Passport and have been using Blackberry Keyone as my work phone until last…
As my company’s grown, the number of internal / external meetings and tasks has become crazy. I have no time to wander around in office and have casual chats with fellows any more. 
 While people in the office have coffee and casual chats I am usually running for the next scheduled meeting or discussion item. Casual office chats is one of the things I miss most. 
 Some colleagues who have…
This post is my reflection on company culture and the things that have been on my mind as a founder. You can read more about Oursky’s progress in this X’mas special post , where we recap our learnings and achievements for 2016. 
 Oursky has grown in several ways this year. Firstly, we welcomed 6 full-time staff to the company. We’re hiring in Hong Kong and Taipei. We’ve also celebrated many…
(This is an email I sent to my team after I received a Slack automated email saying we have 57% of message in private vs Public Channels) 
 Hi team, 
 I want to address an ongoing concern that is getting dangerous as it will jeopardize our culture in the long run. 
 I know I might sound a bit unusually serious below. So please bear with me; if you think otherwise, feel free to voice…

 

 Just came across this old photo of my room 6 years ago…. I was using Mandrake on AMD CPU computer
and Windows XP on a Dell Notebook. And… something I don’t remember already… 
 
 I just remembered I used a small notebook in my pocket extensively, but don’t recall that I have those small memo with “todo” written down…. 
 I used that hubs for networking??? 
 I’ve…