100 Conversations: how people build, work and think in the age of AI
A text-based reconciliation used to take Amy three days; Excel couldn't handle it, so someone had to check it line by line. This year the job went to the company's Copilot: ten minutes to finish, plus an hour of her review. KPMG next door cut four hundred assistant managers this year, and senior leadership said in a meeting that by 2030 all workpapers and testing will be done by AI, with junior…
The day he left Salesforce, the company offered Zheng Qian another 150k raise to keep him. He left anyway, saying the salary was about as high as it goes in London, but that was not his ceiling. Born in 1995, he is building a new company with the same engineers who were acquired alongside him: the market said no to his product twice, and he added one layer, then another, before customers finally…
A failed startup, failed investments, failed research, failed PhD applications. Yue says her world felt like a black swamp dragging her down. Yet the moment her life truly turned around, nothing had changed: the fracture hadn't healed, the offer hadn't come, New York was still muggy. I asked her how she did it. She smiled and said: maybe because I have failed too many times. Today she is a fully…
He led an AI team at an investment bank, but most of the products died in compliance review. When Zac quit to start his own company, he avoided the white-collar market of document writing, customer service, and coding assistants: that market may end up swallowed by OpenAI and Anthropic. He chose construction instead. When a site stalls for a day, workers still clock in, equipment rentals still…
A gaming addict who failed several courses in his sophomore year and nearly got expelled, barely reaching 1900 on the Dota ladder. Ten years later, he turned down a postdoc offer from a top American university and invitations from leading AI labs to start his own company. One of the earliest LLM-based multi-agent open source frameworks, its core code written in a single night. He says agent…
The robotics final pitted HIT Shenzhen against its own main campus. The freshman who spent a hundred hours a week with the team is now a PhD working on multimodal AI. He has seen research that serves the business, research that serves a vision, and research that serves the boss; after his deskmate got rich on Intel stock, he realized the big returns all live in uncertain things.
A live demo froze in front of a client. After that day, Lilly never demoed her team's product live again; she played pre-recorded videos instead. Why do some AI product managers only ever show clients recordings? The answer isn't in the product. It's in how the team is being pushed to run.
A customer relations lead at a big cloud company in London: soothing the customer first is actually the wrong move? Ask about business impact first; communicate, don't coddle. AI cut her response time in half, and took away her slow pace for good. She catches other people's emotions all day; at night she goes back to her room, plays guitar, and sings.
Mark waited tables at a Korean restaurant, ten hours a day; then spent a week in New York on less than 30 hours of sleep. He says science-minded people always want a clear requirement from the client first, but what a client wants is the product placed right in front of them. Climbing is just climbing, chopping is just chopping. Wherever fate takes him, that is where he settles in and lives well.
Nobody on earth can tell you exactly how much cobalt traded last year. Her job is to work out the answer. It is a craft AI cannot learn yet; but the job itself is turning her into a machine: talk fast, react fast, and never make anyone repeat a question.
On video calls, Aya deliberately keeps her camera off and lowers her voice. She's Asian, her face reads young, and the moment she's on screen, the compliance team tends not to take her seriously. She sells financial derivatives; she loves change, loves AI, loves new things. But banking, the industry she's in, stands for stability and order. An infinite player, stuck inside a machine that only…
Provincial first prizes in both the math and informatics olympiads, Tsinghua's School of Economics and Management, a postdoc at Harvard Business School. In late 2025 a friend asked him to co-found an AI startup; this wave favors exactly his kind of background. Too bad he doesn't do large models: what he studies every day is the stock market. And the essay contest he never won first prize in? More…
AI can blast a thousand emails in one night, yet it cannot close a single client. A confession from a UK study-abroad salesperson: once AI flattens a standardized skill like drafting essays, what becomes truly valuable is everything it cannot reach. Trust, full-chain service, and whether anyone is still willing to meet you in person.
One day your agent starts giving wrong answers. Nobody touched the code, nobody changed the prompt. Turns out the provider silently swapped the model version behind the same API. In a demo you just refresh; in regulated fields like investing and finance, it's an incident. Getting an agent from 'it runs' to 'I dare ship it' isn't a matter of a better prompt; it's an entire layered system of…
She missed the Beijing Film Academy cutoff by a single point, then kept falling at the final step: repeat exams, grad-school attempts, applications abroad. She studied film and read philosophy, fascinated by the broken beauty of Macbeth and Anna Karenina. She made her way to London, waited tables, did marketing, and by a string of flukes leapt into AI, running a 20-follower account up to 200,000…
I used to think the hard part of getting two agents to talk was the protocol. After wiring up an open-source collaboration platform on my own machine, I found the opposite: a message lands in under a second, but the agent receiving it takes tens of seconds just to open its eyes. The bottleneck was never on the wire. The real unsolved problem is how to wake an agent that isn't always running, and…
She studied law and economics at the same time as an undergrad, did law at Northwestern, and landed at one of China's most elite 'Red Circle' law firms. By year five she'd finally earned work-life balance, and then she quit for an open-source AI company in London. Not laid off, not burned out, she jumped on purpose. What made her decide was an 'elevator theory': how many floors you've risen…
I wanted to do a 30-minute workout and stood in my room with zero motivation. Then I changed the goal to 'do 1 push-up' and ended up finishing the original plan. The core of Mini Habits is one sentence: don't set goals big, set them so small that failure is impossible. But this simple method hides two traps: you'll unconsciously measure yourself against your best day, and you'll mistake 'looking…
A friend built a clean, complete product in a week — two years ago that was two months of work for a small team. Third week after launch: single-digit daily active users. AI has answered 'can it be built' for everyone, but it never touched the two questions that actually decide life or death: does anyone want this; and even if they do, why would anyone ever see it. The moment building became…
A young woman stands in line outside a luxury boutique, glancing up every few seconds at the bag in the window. She isn't looking at the bag. She's looking at a version of 'her' from a script she didn't write. From cigarettes to handbags, from the right neighborhood to the trendy milk tea, behind almost every 'I want that' in your head stands an invisible author. The good news: a story can't be…
It's 3 AM and you can't sleep, while the person who hurt you is sleeping soundly. In The Power of Now, Tolle reveals that almost all your pain comes from replaying the past and rehearsing the future. Here are the techniques that actually work, and why even not being able to do them is nothing to resist.
An argument you didn't win replays in your head for half a day. A comment that rubbed you wrong has you typing and deleting for half an hour. Every push-back drains a little of your strength. Twenty-five hundred years ago Lao Tzu used water to describe another way to live: it doesn't wrestle the rock, it flows downward, it has no shape. It never tried to win, so it never lost.
Every good thing reveals its bad half six months later. Every bad thing reveals its good half six months later. From Zhuangzi's Qiwulun, why every category is temporary, and why reflexive hesitation may be the rarest skill of our era.
Companies preach mission. Platforms preach empowerment. Influencers preach self-discipline. Behind every sagely narrative may be hiding the great thief's most refined armor. Starting from Zhuangzi's Quqie, why sage and thief are forever twins.
If 'the Way' is about not stepping onto the battlefield, then 'the Craft' is about how to fight once you must. Sun Tzu left three levers: momentum, tempo, and the general's character. Winners aren't stronger. They're better at shaping the field, controlling the tempo, and managing themselves.
Two product managers fought head-to-head for two weeks over the same project. The line got cut. Sun Tzu left three retreats 2,500 years ago: don't step onto the field, don't fight head-on, don't drag it out. The key to winning isn't fighting harder. It's fighting less.
Most people who have heard of both Claude Agent SDK and OpenAI Agents SDK share the vague feeling that 'Claude seems stronger' without being able to say where. The real difference isn't the agent loop. It's the harness the runtime sets up by default: one is a workbench, the other is a cockpit.
We tell ourselves mature couples don't fight. After thousands of hours of taped arguments, Gottman found the real danger isn't the fight, it's when the fighting stops. Four styles, only one fatal. Three rules for anyone tired of pretending nothing is wrong.
You think your past is pushing you into who you are now. It's actually the future you see most vividly that's pulling you there. From Fermat's principle of light to the version of you already standing at the summit, the future self is the cause. People who fear going broke are being pulled toward exactly that future.
Wang Yangming once told a student: you see everyone on the street as a saint because you're playing the saint yourself. You think you're looking at other people, but it's your own projection. The world is just a mirror, borrowing you to reveal itself.
Large language models are stripping the halo from knowledge work. A contract review compressed into a single API call, the shell of reverence already cracked. Where does the surplus value flow now? Five predictions, four moves, for those feeling lost.
You've been thinking about happiness too thinly. Seligman says there are at least three paths to it—pleasure is only the shallowest. Engagement and meaning are what actually hold a life up.
Anxious, avoidant, secure, fearful. Attachment theory explains why you keep falling apart in love, and why you're not stuck with your childhood.
The commentator says the player must be feeling the pressure now. You think it was the new shoes that broke your record. You decide the date went cold because you said the wrong thing. We can't help looking for causes—but most of the time that 'cause' doesn't exist. It's just math: the good regresses down, the bad regresses up.
A bat and a ball cost 110 dollars total. The bat costs 100 more than the ball. How much is the ball? If you blurted out 10 dollars, you just made the same mistake as over half of Harvard students. From Thinking, Fast and Slow—why being smart and being rational are not the same thing.
It's 11 PM and you just wanted to check tomorrow's weather. By the time your phone hits your chest, it's 1:40 AM. What you lose isn't two and a half hours—it's your capacity for deep thought, your patience to sit still, and your ability to do the things that only pay off over the long run.
That person around you who never says no, never gets angry, and swallows everything—they might not be as nice as they seem. From No More Mr Nice Guy, here's the dark side of the Nice Guy, and how to break free from people-pleasing.
Every time you give, there's a condition attached—one you never said out loud. From No More Mr Nice Guy, here's why invisible contracts never work, and how to break the cycle.
Procrastination isn't a time management problem or a moral failing—it's about how you relate to yourself. Drawing from The Procrastination Equation, here's the psychology behind why we stall, and how to break the equation that keeps us stuck.
Many problems in the AI industry aren't technical problems—they're systemic structural problems. And most people's way of solving them only reinforces the structure. Inspired by Thinking in Systems, here's the difference between chasing metrics and seeing structure.
When AI pushes knowledge work toward zero marginal cost, how do you rebuild who you are? The shift from 'what I do' to 'what I'm trying to solve'—and why taste and leadership are what actually matter now.
Three fascinating psychology insights: how to hack your habits through identity, why we need delayed gratification, and how to protect yourself by downgrading criticism to information.
From architecture and setup to config, session management, multi-agent playbooks, and security—a hands-on guide after diving deep into OpenClaw. No opening quote, no closing citation.
A conversation with Michael: from the Agricultural Revolution and the Age of Discovery to AI Agents—history has no rewards for bystanders; how ordinary people can use Agents to define the next era.
A conversation with Michael: from labor and survival, horse's rear and rocket boosters, evolving property rights to Agent-citizen binding—don't fear AI; humanity will thrive.
A conversation with Lao Bai: from Vibe Coding's zero commercial value, why audiences swipe away from confusion, glutamate withdrawal, to why willpower is a lie—stop grinding against tech; try winning back your focus instead.
A conversation with Lao Bai: from big tech layoffs and the Hollywood model to human-AI integration and embracing uncertainty—how to stand firm and move forward in the AI era.
AI is not a technological revolution—for most people, it is a quiet robbery. From wallets to truth: layoffs and stock prices soaring, the ladder kicked away, and the absurd story of being slandered by AI in the very article about being slandered. What can we still trust?
A conversation with Ting: from trust crumbling at 'Made by AI' to deliberately imperfect images, vulnerability as a weapon, and who should steer scientific discovery—in an age of perfection, realness and connection are the answer.
From Feynman's 'artificial flight' analogy to AI nurses in hospitals—Lao Bai at the cafe on why you're the bird, AI's the plane, and your edge is saying 'that's wrong.'