After AI Takes Everything
Prompted by letters from three engineers, the author asks what remains for humans as AI takes over execution, naming judgment, taste, and derivation as irreplaceable, and warns against the erosion of subjecthood.
Airing's Blog (English)
Airing - INFJ | Blogger | Full-stack engineer | SG
Latest posts
Weekly #35: Vibe Coding Weekends with Professor Claude
Recaps six weekends of vibe coding: new blog modules, a comics pipeline, the MoneyWise finance app, fourteen immersive tech essays, and a self-made language, Penelope.
Weekly #34: The Joy of Making Things
Documents a month of building with Claude Code: a blog rebuilt in a weekend, a finance app shipped in two hours, and how AI amplifies the joy of creating.
2025: A Brand New Journey
A 2025 year in review: moving to Singapore, MoFlow entering maintenance mode, a new TikTok job with first-time people management, a serious kidney stone ordeal, and an AI-powered workflow built on Tana, NotebookLM, Claude Code, and OpenClaw.
Weekly #33: The Ladder of Inference
Introduces the Ladder of Inference, the seven steps from raw sensory data to belief and action and their limits, arguing for lowering fixed judgments.
Weekly #32: A Sun Yat-sen University Alumni Interview
Shares an alumni interview with Sun Yat-sen University's Philosophy Department on why the author chose philosophy, and how it shaped his tech career.
Weekly #31: A Claude-Powered Reading Flow
Shares a reading workflow built on Claude and MCP: weekday reading in Reader, weekend synthesis with Claude and Readwise notes, and thoughts on reading in the AI era.
Weekly #30: Written on My 30th Birthday
Written on the author's 30th birthday, reflecting on a decade of study, career changes, and moving abroad, and on resisting calcifying into repetition of the past.
The Life of a Game Component: From Load to Screen
An analysis of how mini-game containers cooperate with game engines, tracing a game component's full lifecycle from script loading and rendering context through to final on-screen display.
Weekly #29: A New Life
Covers a six-month gap after leaving TME: building MoFlow while job-hunting, landing offers from TikTok and Bilibili, and starting a new life and job in Singapore.
2024: Farewell, Midsummer
A 2024 year in review: leaving a five-year job at TME to build the AI wellness app MoFlow, an App Store review holdup, and reflecting on the fear of losing control.
Weekly #28: AI Has No Capacity for Experience
Marking MoFlow's App Store launch, explores why AI lacks the capacity for lived experience, the limits of language, and the pitfalls of simulated emotional companionship.
Exploring and Building an AI Mental Wellness App
Chronicles the design behind MoFlow, an AI wellness app that breaks expressive writing into five stages, paired with mood tracking and CBT-based analysis.
Mac Niche App Recommendations and Workflow Sharing (2024)
Shares niche Mac apps and workflows built over years of work, covering note-taking tools, task management, developer tools, and AI search and chat products.
Weekly #27: A New Way of Living
Reflects on leaving Shenzhen for Dali to build the AI mental-wellness startup MoFlow with a six-person team, and on tools for remote collaboration.
Farewell, Summer
The author reflects on quitting Tencent Music after five years, exploring the purpose of work, the trap of worldly success, and the search for meaning through the goose cage, happiness, and courage.
Airing's Consultation Service
Airing launches two consultation options: free letters for listening and advice, plus a paid 50-minute call covering career, tech, and writing questions.
Weekly #26: The Journey
A travel diary of a nine-day New Zealand road trip in April 2024, from Christchurch to Wanaka and Queenstown, with alpaca farms, the Milky Way, and paragliding.
Personal Toolkit and Gear Recommendations
A rundown of the author's personal tech stack, from MacBook, iPhone, and HHKB keyboard hardware picks to the Raycast, HeptaBase, Readwise, Todoist, and Fantastical software he actually relies on daily.
Weekly #25: Love Concrete People
A written version of an internal TED talk arguing that engineering quality assurance should treat user feedback as coming from real people, not just metrics.
2023: Escaping the Drift
A 2023 year in review: near-resignation amid burnout, then a transfer into Cocos and iOS/Android work with a promotion, a new relationship, and a blog migration.
Weekly #24: Ten Years of Programming
Traces a decade of programming from 2014 to 2023, from VB and Java Swing through web frontend, iOS, and Flutter, and distills lessons on love-driven learning.
Weekly #23: Time Management When You're Doing Too Much
Shares a calendar-plus-reminders system for separating fixed events from flexible tasks, arguing focus and fewer context switches beat any productivity app.
Weekly #22: The Joy of the Present
Reflects on finding joy amid pressure by cherishing the present, alongside a rough stretch of illness, a switch to iOS development, and moving house.
Weekly #21: Short Video in the Age of Speed
Examines how playback speed, three-minute recaps, and viral songs erode attention, extending to cultural frenzies like Zibo barbecue and the loss of depth.
Weekly #20: Restart
A March 2023 monthly log centered on the Japanese drama Restart, praising its emotional honesty and warmth, alongside notes on badminton and cycling to work.
Weekly #19: The Meaning of Keeping a Journal
Reflects on six years of journaling as a tool for self-awareness, a way to find meaning in daily life, and a record of small beautiful moments.
Inside Big Tech's In-House Cross-Platform Frameworks
A deep dive into four directions behind big tech's in-house cross-platform frameworks, unpacking how Kun, WebF, and Weex 2.0 choose script engines and implement CSS, with trade-offs compared.
Weekly #18: Escaping Social Media
Reflects on escaping social media: how it weakens expression, fragments attention, and erodes identity, and shares habits like RSS reading and letter writing.
2022: Peace and Joy
A 2022 year in review: a promotion, a deep dive into Chromium and JS engines, better emotional control, a brief romance, and thoughts on Messi and Faker's title runs.
Weekly #17: Go Where Your Heart Leads
Weekly #17 follows a Bilibili creator drifting across China by bicycle, weaving in Liu Cixin's The Mountain and Xu Xiake's travels to reflect on wanderlust and living life on your own terms.
Weekly #16: My Personal Information Feed
Weekly #16 diagrams a personal information-feed pipeline: Inoreader subscriptions with keyword alerts, Reeder reading shortcuts, and Readwise highlights syncing into Logseq and Obsidian.
The Chromium Rendering Pipeline — From Bytes to Pixels
A breakdown of Chromium's browser architecture and process model, tracing how Blink and V8 evolved, and detailing what the main and compositor threads do inside the Render Process.
Weekly #13: The Mysticism Lever and the Isekai Groups
Weekly #13 looks at young people's growing embrace of online divination and the mysticism lever, plus Douban's isekai groups, framing both as coping tools for the pressure of alienated labor.
Case Sensitivity in Frontend Development
This post catalogs case-sensitive scenarios in frontend development: HTTP headers, URLs, cookies, CSS, and traces Chromium and Blink source code to find where header names get lowercased.
Weekly #12: The Three Great Romances of Frontend
Weekly #12 covers frontend's so-called three great romances (rich text editors, in-browser spreadsheets, CRDTs) and path dependency in everyday life, from QWERTY keyboards to train seat numbering.
Weekly #11: How Divination Works
Weekly #11 breaks down the mechanics of I Ching yarrow-stalk divination step by step, plus picks for the file-linking app Hook and the Emojimix web toy, alongside the week's viewing log.
Weekly #10: Games I Love (Vol. 1)
Weekly #10 rounds up favorite games: Undertale, To the Moon, Don't Starve, Darkest Dungeon, The Stanley Parable, Breath of the Wild, and Hollow Knight, each with the author's personal take.
Weekly #9: From High Efficiency to High Drain — Observations and Reflections
On how chasing efficiency in the mobile-internet era turns into exhaustion and self-denial, arguing for slowing down, plus picks on a social-trends report and the Muse 2.0 app.
Weekly #8: Three-Act Structure and the Hero's Journey
Breaks down the three-act structure and the Hero's Journey using World War Z, Kung Fu Panda, and The Invisible Guest, plus picks on note apps Obsidian, LogSeq, and Hepta.
Weekly #7: Models for Impromptu Speaking
Five speaking and communication frameworks: Yes And, the Pyramid Principle, FFC compliments, FFA reporting, and nonviolent communication, plus picks on an anime and a JS tutorial site.
Weekly #6: Perception Checking in the Art of Communication
How perception checking from Looking Out, Looking In reduces noise from perceptual gaps in communication, plus picks: an input switcher, a vocab plugin, and screenshot tools.
Weekly #5: A Day in My Life at TME
A day in the life working at TME, plus picks on programming design decisions, 1Password 8's Electron rewrite, and a new weekly log of reading and coding time.
Weekly #4: The Evolution of Personal Blogs
A look at how personal blogs have evolved over the years.
Weekly #3: A Bouquet of Love
A farewell letter on a brief 20.5-day romance, framed by the film A Bouquet of Love, on what love is, why we need it, and how to move on after losing it.
Weekly #2: Reclaiming Lost Curiosity
Explores why curiosity fades with age and technology, using Leonardo da Vinci as an example to outline ways to rebuild it through observation and reflection.
Weekly #1: The Beginning — Why I'm Starting a Newsletter
The debut issue of a weekly newsletter, explaining the shift from long, heavy blog essays to lighter, more frequent writing, with reflections on impermanence and Nintendo's game design philosophy.
Engine Internals: String-to-Number Conversion in JavaScript
Compares nine ways to convert strings to numbers in JavaScript, benchmarks them, and traces how parseInt and parseFloat are implemented inside the V8 engine.
2021: Finding My Own Way Forward
A 2021 year in review: shipping Flutter Kant into QQ Music, a fast promotion followed by a loss of direction, and reflections on multitasking and anxiety.
On the Value of Existence and the Experience of Life
Explores the existentialist question of life's meaning and the collapse of assigned value, offering practices for living fully, from ordinariness to connection.