Shimin Zhang — The Journal

Programming, entrepreneurship, machine learning.

Latest posts

Inhabited Design, a Skill for the AI Slop Site Problem

Purple gradients are the new em dash. Building inhabited-design — a Claude Code skill that samples a different designer to inhabit on every run — and the detours through attractors, personas, self-refinement, and verbalized sampling it took to escape the slop.

Jun 21, 2026

What I learned asking 11 AI models to grade each other's AI predictions

An experiment on model personalities, a delusion index, and the open-weight dark horse contender I didn't see coming.

Apr 23, 2026

Opus 4.7 isn't dumb, it's just lazy

Some follow up experiments with Claude Opus 4.7 based on Simon Willison's Pelican Benchmark Shocker.

Apr 20, 2026