September 2026 Thought Notes: Architecture, Temples and First Principles

2026 September Thought Notes 220 notes this month | recorded from 2026-09-01 to 2026-09-10 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 105 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 44 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 34 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 16 · Travel, Places and Cities 8 · Reading, Ideas and History 7 · Business, Investing and Career 3 · Content, Craft and Recording 2 · Body, Health and Daily Life 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

September 19, 2026 · 115 min · 24327 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

August 2026 Thought Notes: Agent Harness, Product and Self-Knowledge

2026 August Thought Notes 484 notes this month | recorded from 2026-08-04 to 2026-08-31 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 212 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 118 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 96 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 36 · Business, Investing and Career 9 · Content, Craft and Recording 6 · Reading, Ideas and History 4 · Travel, Places and Cities 3 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

August 31, 2026 · 223 min · 47494 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

July 2026 Thought Notes: Engineering, Content and Cash Flow

Quick Navigation Start with the long read: 9 sections in the body above. 17 archived notes this month, filed under 7 themes: Daily Notes and Everything Else · 6 AI and Agent Systems · 4 Self-Knowledge and Psychology · 2 Content, Craft and Recording · 2 Business, Investing and Career · 1 Travel, Places and Cities · 1 Reading, Ideas and History · 1 For most of July I was in Shenzhen, and I also stopped briefly for a few days in other cities in Guangdong. ...

July 28, 2026 · 50 min · 10597 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

2026 June Thought Notes: The Pushing-Away Comes Before the Reason for Pushing Away

Quick Navigation Start with the long read: 12 sections in the body above. 34 archived notes this month, filed under 7 themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology · 13 Daily Notes and Everything Else · 5 Business, Investing and Career · 5 AI and Agent Systems · 4 Product, Engineering and Open Source · 3 Content, Craft and Recording · 2 Reading, Ideas and History · 2 Prologue: A slack surface, and high density underneath In June I came back from Laos to Shenzhen. ...

June 30, 2026 · 54 min · 11497 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

2026 May Thought Notes: On the Edge, I Recognize Myself Through Action

Quick Navigation Start with the long read: 9 sections in the body above. 1 archived notes this month, filed under 1 themes: Daily Notes and Everything Else · 1 Prologue: A May Without flomo For the entire month of May, I did not write a single flomo note. I barely posted to my feed either. This was not laziness. It was a conscious decision. I had already decided on April 30 that I would stop. The reason is simple: I no longer felt I needed it. Or more accurately — could it have a better form? I want to use my own product. It is not perfect yet, but I want to fully think through and ship the thing I have in my head. The remaining steps are few. It is close. ...

May 31, 2026 · 25 min · 5157 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
April 2026 Thought Notes

April 2026 Thought Notes: Living in Laos, Borders, AI and Agents

2026 April Thought Notes 222 notes this month | recorded from 2026-04-02 to 2026-04-30 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 87 · Travel, Places and Cities 56 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 34 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 29 · Reading, Ideas and History 5 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 4 · Body, Health and Daily Life 3 · Business, Investing and Career 2 · Content, Craft and Recording 2 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

April 30, 2026 · 167 min · 35417 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
March 2026 Thought Notes

March 2026 Thought Notes: Money, Genocide Memory, Southeast Asia

2026 March Thought Notes 464 notes this month | recorded from 2026-03-01 to 2026-03-31 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 135 · Travel, Places and Cities 109 · Reading, Ideas and History 57 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 55 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 48 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 30 · Content, Craft and Recording 11 · Business, Investing and Career 11 · Body, Health and Daily Life 8 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

March 31, 2026 · 392 min · 83333 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

AI and Self-Identity: Who Am I in the AI Age

Preface: This article was written on a night in Lhasa. At an altitude of over 3,000 meters, the air is thin and the stars are very close. One evening I stood in the courtyard, alone, and watched the moon in the sky for a long time. That moon doesn’t lose a bit of its light because of AI’s existence. The moonlight is still truly beautiful — What do humans still possess in the AI era? ...

March 1, 2026 · 15 min · 3100 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
February 2026 Thought Notes

February 2026 Thought Notes

2026 February Thought Notes 363 notes this month | recorded from 2026-02-04 to 2026-02-28 Themes: Reading, Ideas and History 85 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 63 · AI and Agent Systems 63 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 61 · Travel, Places and Cities 41 · Business, Investing and Career 19 · Content, Craft and Recording 14 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 13 · Body, Health and Daily Life 4 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

February 28, 2026 · 304 min · 64682 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

January 2026 Thought Notes

2026 January Thought Notes 386 notes this month | recorded from 2026-01-01 to 2026-01-31 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 89 · Reading, Ideas and History 79 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 70 · Business, Investing and Career 46 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 44 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 23 · Travel, Places and Cities 14 · Body, Health and Daily Life 12 · Content, Craft and Recording 9 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

January 31, 2026 · 225 min · 47838 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

August 2025 Thought Notes: Self-Knowledge, Daily Life, AI and Agent Systems

2025 August Thought Notes 332 notes this month | recorded from 2025-08-01 to 2025-08-30 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 94 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 74 · AI and Agent Systems 47 · Reading, Ideas and History 43 · Travel, Places and Cities 25 · Business, Investing and Career 17 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 16 · Content, Craft and Recording 9 · Body, Health and Daily Life 7 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

August 31, 2025 · 189 min · 40150 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

April 2025 Thought Notes: Self-Knowledge, AI and Agent Systems, Engineering

2025 April Thought Notes 113 notes this month | recorded from 2025-04-05 to 2025-04-17 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 30 · AI and Agent Systems 30 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 26 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 12 · Reading, Ideas and History 5 · Travel, Places and Cities 4 · Business, Investing and Career 4 · Body, Health and Daily Life 2 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

April 30, 2025 · 92 min · 19433 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

March 2025 Thought Notes: AI and Agent Systems, Self-Knowledge, Engineering

2025 March Thought Notes 52 notes this month | recorded from 2025-03-01 to 2025-03-22 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 21 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 15 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 8 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 4 · Business, Investing and Career 2 · Travel, Places and Cities 1 · Reading, Ideas and History 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

March 31, 2025 · 51 min · 10783 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

February 2025 Thought Notes: AI and Agent Systems, Self-Knowledge, Engineering

2025 February Thought Notes 40 notes this month | recorded from 2025-02-18 to 2025-02-27 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 11 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 9 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 8 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 4 · Business, Investing and Career 3 · Reading, Ideas and History 2 · Travel, Places and Cities 2 · Body, Health and Daily Life 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

February 28, 2025 · 50 min · 10471 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

Nango in Practice: Let Users Add Their Own MCP Servers in Chat

A model needs a tool to check project status. A user asks, “What’s blocking the demo project?” The model understands the question, but has no way to read the project’s state. The experience we want is straightforward: the user adds their project service, authorizes access once, then returns to the same conversation and gets an answer grounded in data. What this article verifies Sources were checked as of October 3, 2026, using Nango source and client version 0.71.12. The local examples use Node.js 22+ and have been tested for tool discovery, input validation, and request/response handling, including a local replacement for the proxy adapter. Project data is synthetic; the experiment does not call a model or execute real OAuth and proxy requests through Nango Cloud. The public-server sections provide integration steps to test in your own account. Rolling documentation, pinned source, and cloud deployments may differ; a dependency version does not prove protocol support, and customer stories establish only their stated use cases. The available evidence also does not establish that external MCP tools are automatically imported into Nango’s Action catalog. ...

October 3, 2026 · 19 min · 3888 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
Concept illustration: a Personal Agent's bounded run, persistent task, execution environment and result receipt; not an accurate OpenClaw architecture diagram

Personal Agent Technical Research: How OpenClaw Connects One Run to Long-Lived Work

For a Personal Agent to do things reliably on someone’s behalf, it has to connect a single model run to a recoverable task and confirm the result against external state. The model saying “I’ve cancelled it” still does not prove that the merchant stopped the renewal. Consider a design example: the user asks the agent to cancel a monthly subscription, keep the benefits already paid for in the current period, accept no new offers, and not delete the account. The agent finds the subscription and reviews the terms, then clicks confirm; the merchant has already processed the request, but the browser disconnects before the result comes back. Clicking again at that point might do one step too many, and reporting success outright has no basis. Whether this can safely continue depends on what was saved beyond the button. ...

October 3, 2026 · 36 min · 7471 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
Concept illustration: a user delegates errands through a phone, with email, calendar, and completion receipts connected to the user's approval

Personal Agent Product Research: How Instinct Makes People Willing to Delegate Again

For a Personal Agent to earn repeated use, the user has to genuinely carry less of the mental load. If handing over an operation still means chasing progress, rereading results, and nagging it to fix mistakes, the delegation is not complete. One Instinct user documented his own stress test on Reddit: buying snacks across apps and monitoring flight prices, and also researching startups. He was satisfied with part of the results, but he also hit long waits between steps and website verification that required a human to step in. He was willing to let the agent find things and compare prices, and willing to let it prepare an order, but not yet ready to hand over his credit card and let it pay freely. Original stress-test post ...

October 3, 2026 · 32 min · 6710 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
The same red origami bird moves through successive transparent frames, illustrating reusable rules and animation consistency

Why Opus 5.5 Makes Better Animations: What Real Projects Reveal

An animated character moves through several shots without changing color or proportions. Captions appear on cue, and the final movement lands on a musical beat. Watching a piece like this, it is tempting to conclude that the model has suddenly learned to understand video. Yet in the public Shipvideo project, the central artifact Opus delivers is an HTML document. A browser turns it into frames, and an encoder turns those frames into a video. Project overview ...

September 26, 2026 · 16 min · 3232 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
A design canvas connected by lines to desktop and mobile interfaces

Maintaining a UI on Your Own: A Design System with Figma, Figwright, and AI

I build products on my own, and I want a design system that helps me maintain their UI and frontend over time. Finishing a page is only the beginning: features get added, styles change, and another platform may need support. When I return to a project, I want to build on the design already there and understand what a change will affect. That calls for a method I can maintain myself. When I want to change a color, I need to know where to edit it. When I want a different layout, I need somewhere to compare options. When I hand implementation to AI, it needs to find the existing components. I also want the interface to feel more thoughtfully designed, while starting with free tools wherever possible. File organization, tool choices, and visual judgment are connected problems. ...

September 26, 2026 · 29 min · 6060 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

IMStage: Editable Chat Scenes

The same support demo needs a WeChat version, a WhatsApp version, and different people and photos. The dialogue barely changes, but the image has to be rebuilt. IMStage keeps those changes inside an editable scene for product demos, teaching materials and fictional stories. Describe a moment in IMStage . AI opens the workspace and generates the dialogue and imagery. You can then edit messages, people, photos and layout directly, or ask for another change in plain language. ...

September 23, 2026 · 2 min · 355 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
Layers of transparent engineering blueprints rise from a workbench until a physical test block marked with a restrained red failure signal stops them

AI Made Me Smarter—and Slower to Meet Reality

During a 48-hour engineering task, I wrote down one sentence: “At this point, I’ve spent half the time designing, researching, understanding the requirements, judging the boundaries, and developing my taste and intuition. I haven’t started writing code.” The task began as a limited feature. After I kept discussing it with AI, it quickly grew a product model, system boundaries, and a complete design. Every step had a rationale. Every piece connected to the next. I could feel myself thinking faster and farther, holding more layers in mind at once. ...

August 15, 2026 · 9 min · 1754 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
OpenClaw routing from internet channels through the resident Gateway, deterministic bindings and session keys into per-agent enclaves, device nodes and external side effects

OpenClaw's Long-Running Gateway: Continuity Does Not Mean One Shared Session

Suppose one company runs two Telegram bots: one serves European customers, one serves American customers. Both bots hand messages to the same support agent, and the session isolation policy is set to per-channel-peer. One platform user ID happens to appear in both accounts. The system generates the same key: agent:support:telegram:direct:tg:12345 A conversation from the European inbox can then surface in the American inbox’s context. No model jailbreak, no database corruption, no random routing. The system worked exactly as configured — the session key simply lacked the accountId dimension. ...

August 7, 2026 · 19 min · 3864 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
The n8n deterministic workflow spine, the constrained Agent spur, human and idempotency gates, external receipt reconciliation, and the Redis worker Postgres queue-mode yard

n8n's Deterministic Exoskeleton: Why Queues and Workers Do Not Guarantee Exactly-Once Side Effects

The previous article, the n8n primer , already started from Manual Trigger → Edit Fields → IF and covered Growth OS, constrained Agents, human approval, the operation ledger, result feedback and alternatives. This article does not build another three-node workflow. We start from a less photogenic failure window: worker → external API write succeeds worker → execution success not yet written back worker → crashes At this moment Redis may hold no active job and Postgres still holds a running execution, yet a third-party system has already received an email, created a record or charged a payment. Re-running the execution can turn n8n green again, and it can also repeat an external write. ...

August 7, 2026 · 21 min · 4346 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
The Pi minimal agent kernel, the detachable extension rail, provider and host OS trust boundaries, and the JSONL session tree below

Pi by Subtraction: What the Minimal Agent Kernel Keeps and Who Takes Responsibility

By default Pi hands the model only four tools: read, bash, edit, write. It has no built-in Plan Mode, Todo, MCP, subagent, permission popup or background bash. Reading this far, it would be easy to write Pi as a hymn to minimalism: four tools are enough, and every complex framework can be deleted. The more useful question is tougher. After you delete a capability, where does the duty it used to carry go? ...

August 7, 2026 · 18 min · 3766 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
A shared organizational agent dispatch console connected to permission vaults, memory archives, and isolated work cells

Claude Tag Deep Dive: From Shared Slack AI to an Organizational Agent Runtime

Calling Claude Tag a Slack bot misses its most consequential product decision. It turns a channel into a place where an agent can be authorized, remember, and keep working: a team shares one executor; each task runs asynchronously in a thread-level sandbox hosted by Anthropic; Agent Proxy injects external credentials at the network boundary; and the result returns to the public thread with a traceable record. The Claude Tag documentation describes these mechanisms in unusually concrete terms. ...

August 5, 2026 · 23 min · 4772 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
A precise wooden bridge extending from a drafting table into a steel load-testing rig

I Don't Have an Execution Problem. I Need a Battlefield That Can Say No

At the beginning of 2026, my GitHub contribution graph stayed nearly blank for several weeks. A few months later, the same graph showed hundreds of contributions in a single week. In July, this blog published 55 articles in Chinese , while GitHub’s contribution calendar recorded 733 contributions. Those numbers prove neither quality nor user value, much less a business result. GitHub also makes clear that contributions may include qualifying commits, pull requests, issues, reviews, and other activity; the number cannot simply be relabeled as a commit count. GitHub’s profile contributions reference ...

August 3, 2026 · 6 min · 1243 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
A fixed demand axis beside industry workflow cards being reconnected

Common Sense Is Not the Mechanism: Rebuilding Industries Around Demand, Constraints, and Scarcity

“Is common sense the same as the mechanism underneath?” That was where I got stuck while testing ideas across several industries. I had also reviewed the published work of 22 frontier AI teams and more than 70 people whose work is public. A pattern kept returning: pursue one long-running question, define what good work looks like, connect papers, code, and products, then turn production failures into the next round of tests. But the pattern still did not tell me where industry analysis should begin. ...

August 1, 2026 · 18 min · 3834 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
A layered second-brain system preserving memory while choices branch into lived paths

A Second Brain Preserves Your Decision Function

I had only asked my second brain to organize the thoughts of a friend. It placed scattered notes in order by time, theme, and cause, then tried to explain how she thought about work, money, and freedom. A few thousand words later, I looked at the resulting portrait and realized that the person it had revealed most clearly was not her. It had shown me why I never stop building systems. ...

July 31, 2026 · 13 min · 2641 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
Infinite grids of generated images dissolve into a real mountain and river experience with physical consequences

When Generation Becomes Infinite, Authentic Experiences Begin to Command Value

This piece is a thought experiment in simulated interviews. The interviewees are synthesized from field anthropology and documentary practice perspectives and do not represent any real person’s actual words. I work with AI, yet I am consistently moved by life outside of AI. The blackness of caves in Laos, the sting of a wound after a motorcycle fall, the wind along the Mekong, a stranger who read a story in my eyes, and the stretched-out time of walking instead of riding on the Four Thousand Islands—none of these experiences has model-like efficiency or can be reproduced with one click. ...

July 31, 2026 · 7 min · 1345 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
Hierarchical memory systems heat active nodes, sink outdated information, and retain audit trails

Forgetting Is Harder Than Remembering: Why a Living System Must Know When to Let Go

This piece is a thought experiment conducted through simulated interviews from the perspectives of cognitive neuroscience and AI memory engineering—representing no actual experts. In March 2026, I wrote in a note: In the AI era, perhaps forgetting is more important than remembering. The image that came to mind was simple: a water layer with hot, warm, and cold strata. Recently used knowledge resides in the hot layer, while content untouched for a while gradually sinks downward—only being retrieved under exceptional circumstances. If a knowledge system absorbs information without releasing it, it will eventually degenerate from wisdom into a mere repository. ...

July 31, 2026 · 11 min · 2311 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me