Personal thoughts on current events, society and technology. https://xianxu.dev en https://xianxu.dev/2026/04/tale-of-two-harness urn:xianxu:personal:tale-of-two-harness Adding tool calls to Parley on a flight, watching Claude make a mess, then drawing the architecture boundary for Claude and watching it execute flawlessly within it. The eureka: Claude Code is the execution harness, Parley is the interface for human to inspect and influence — both running on the same shared filesystem state. Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/04/whatsapp_gdpr_fine urn:xianxu:personal:whatsapp_gdpr_fine A close read of the EDPB's €225M WhatsApp fine. The fine is a catch-22 for technical companies, that you need to write your privacy notice concise and easy to understand enough for laymen, yet need to be comprehensive enough to cover all basis. An extremely bad example of regulatory overreach, lacking resemblance of proportionality Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/04/loom_workflow_system urn:xianxu:personal:loom_workflow_system A parley sketching "Loom": after parley, issues, and vision, a fourth repo-native tool for recurring agent-driven routines — the morning health check, the weekly oncall report. Together they form a kind of operating system for how a startup actually thinks. Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/04/vision_alignment_tools urn:xianxu:personal:vision_alignment_tools A parley on bridging business and tech vision. Mermaid is great for structure but weak for magnitude — Wardley Maps and Graphviz with weighted nodes do better. The deeper move: stop being the human translator and become the maintainer of a shared YAML schema. Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/04/what_is_graphviz_dot_language urn:xianxu:personal:what_is_graphviz_dot_language A side-trip into Graphviz's DOT language: a declarative graph format from AT&T Labs where node width, color, and font size let you encode magnitude — exactly the dimension Mermaid lacks. The recommended pipeline: YAML domain model, Python script, DOT, SVG. Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/03/ai-coding-workflow2 urn:xianxu:personal:ai-coding-workflow2 Reflecting on a year of tinkering and adapting to the ever changing world of AI. After a year and 400+ commits on Parley.nvim, I'm convinced the future is humans setting up the environment, with full automation of the coding inside it. Here's my journey so far. Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/03/further_on_the_ideal_of_logmd urn:xianxu:personal:further_on_the_ideal_of_logmd A follow-up parley: log.md is the least controllable file in an agentic issue structure because it depends on the model voluntarily writing during execution. Drop it. Let git history and plan.md diffs serve as the log instead. Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/03/agentic_state_management urn:xianxu:personal:agentic_state_management A parley conversation on why agentic coding state — issues, plans, logs — wants to live inside the repo, beside the code. Single-threaded topological execution as the sane default; minimal files per issue beat reinventing Jira on disk. Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/03/the-rise-of-personal-software urn:xianxu:personal:the-rise-of-personal-software When agentic coding lets a vim user write a custom mouse-aware floating picker because Telescope couldn't do that. The implication for SaaS: programmability stops being a nice-to-have, it becomes the moat. Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/03/ai-coding-workflow urn:xianxu:personal:ai-coding-workflow An iterative spec flow built on a small Makefile and a handful of markdown files — issue, todo, lessons, specs — cuts through the opaque magic of workflow tools. The trick is treating specs as sketches that bound the agent's search space, not exact behavior to confine it. Let AI bringing in world's knowledge! Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/03/dawn-of-ai-coding urn:xianxu:personal:dawn-of-ai-coding The week of February 23, 2026: Dorsey's layoffs, Cloudflare's one-engineer Next.js rewrite, Karpathy's tweet. Picking up Conductor, OpenCode, and OpenSpec over a weekend and shipping 15K lines on Parley — agentic coding is no longer the toy it was ten months ago. Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/02/ai-as-new-abstraction urn:xianxu:personal:ai-as-new-abstraction LLMs are fundamentally stochastic, but that's not new — the whole ML field always was, and it worked. The interesting question is how to ground stochastic computation in deterministic domains. Two paths: build a deterministic shell around the model (coding), or apply it directly where the domain itself tolerates noise (recruiting, marketing, design). Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/02/to-type-or-not urn:xianxu:personal:to-type-or-not Mainstream type systems are simultaneously too strong (closed-world assumptions hurt during change) and too weak (can't say "positive integer" or "age between 0 and 200"). For startups in unsettled domains, duck typing wins — types are a luxury you afford after product-market fit. Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2026/02/data-vs-anecdotes urn:xianxu:personal:data-vs-anecdotes Two quotes about data and intuition. "I trust your data, and my intuition" subtly inverts the knowledge hierarchy and subjugates domain expertise to authority. Bezos's version — when anecdotes disagree with data, investigate the measurement — is the better instinct. Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/11/organic-process urn:xianxu:personal:organic-process Eight questions to ask before introducing a new process. People overestimate how much process helps, underestimate the cost of maintaining it, and assume it'll work just because it exists. And remember, processes rarely die on their own — the ritual often outlives the purpose. Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/11/when-judgement-slips urn:xianxu:personal:when-judgement-slips Judgment slips when decisions become emotional — when you're defending a person, a past call, or a principle rather than solving the problem in front of you. Four signals to watch for in yourself, and four ways to guard against them. Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/11/trump-tariff urn:xianxu:personal:trump-tariff Notes from the IEEPA tariff oral arguments. "Regulate importation" can plausibly mean tariff — but the power to tax is squarely Congress's, the Major Questions and Non-Delegation Doctrines bite, and the one-way ratchet of presidential power makes this near-unanimous against the administration. Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/10/how-to-parli urn:xianxu:personal:how-to-parli Notes from judging a high school parliamentary debate. The opposing side isn't an adversary, it's a collaborator in a joint quest for truth — and the kitchen-sink approach loses on me every time. Logos 70%, ethos 20%, pathos 10%. Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/10/high-output-management urn:xianxu:personal:high-output-management Andrew Grove treats management as a production system, but the deeper claim is that information workers are managers — their raw material is information, their output is influence. In modern Big Tech, being "a manager" isn't a promotion. It's just different work. Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/09/birthright-citizenship-v2 urn:xianxu:personal:birthright-citizenship-v2 Read narrowly, Wong Kim Ark's actual holding only covers children of permanent legal residents. For 127 years, every branch followed the broader dicta instead — until now. A close reading of holding versus dicta, reliance interest, and what the Court is likely to do. Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/09/this-is-the-way urn:xianxu:personal:this-is-the-way Healthcare's fragmentation isn't an accident — it's federalism plus misaligned incentives, where EHR vendors profit by locking customers in. NexHealth's Synchronizer attacks the problem at the technical layer, with the law (and a recent 4th Circuit ruling) on its side, eventually. Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/09/operation-principles urn:xianxu:personal:operation-principles My operating principles: be serious but not too serious, be curious and build a shared mind, be radically transparent, move fast and break things. Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/09/whatsapp-architecture urn:xianxu:personal:whatsapp-architecture How WhatsApp actually worked: Erlang/BEAM/OTP all the way down, the biggest machines money could buy, location-transparent actors, and code hotloading as deployment. They bucked every Cloud Computing canon and ran the world's largest messaging system with a tiny team. Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/08/gerrymandering-war urn:xianxu:personal:gerrymandering-war California's non-partisan commission produced a worse minority seat-to-vote ratio than Texas's partisan one in 2024. The deeper culprit isn't gerrymandering — it's winner-takes-all single-seat districts. Multi-seat districts with ranked-choice voting would do real work here. Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/08/glass-half-full urn:xianxu:personal:glass-half-full A short verse on the choice between half-full and half-empty — I think it is a very important choice. It is a fundamental choice. It affects you more in your life, Much more than in your work. Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/05/joining-nexhealth urn:xianxu:personal:joining-nexhealth Joining NexHealth as Director of Engineering. Software and AI are eating the world — it's time they ate healthcare too. The mission: build the infrastructure layer that lets EHRs, doctors, developers, and patients actually exchange data. Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/05/ai-coding-take-2 urn:xianxu:personal:ai-coding-take-2 After more time pair-coding with Claude Code, the awe wears off. It's an overly eager junior with raw smarts and no taste — fast, useful for onboarding, but prone to ridiculous code that you'd reject from a new grad. Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/05/conversation_around_concurrent_programming_models urn:xianxu:personal:conversation_around_concurrent_programming_models A Parley transcript on Python's asyncio, Trio, and structured concurrency. The arc is almost comical: callbacks to promises to async/await to TaskGroups — we hid the tree structure of concurrency, then had to put it back. We should have stuck with future monads. Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/05/birthright-citizenship urn:xianxu:personal:birthright-citizenship From English jus soli through Dred Scott to Wong Kim Ark, gathering the historical context around Trump's executive order. The merits are less clear-cut than contemporary news suggests once you go back to the original sources. Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/05/facebook-move-on urn:xianxu:personal:facebook-move-on Leaving Meta after a decade. The Facebook of the Red Culture Book — "What would you do if you were not afraid?" — is not the Meta of muscular energy and top-down NFT, Messaging Interop, and Metaverse. A goodbye, and a question worth carrying into the next chapter. Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/04/in-love-of-desert urn:xianxu:personal:in-love-of-desert Spring in Phoenix, the Palo Verde trees in bloom, and the Leica Q2 finally clicking — small package, fast lens, physical dials that let you pre-set the shot before raising the camera. Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/04/reflection-on-ai-coding urn:xianxu:personal:reflection-on-ai-coding Five days, ten thousand lines of Lua, no prior experience with the language. Claude Code is not auto-complete — it's a giant pattern-matching machine that needs grounding through tests and architecture. The 25x figure is cheeky, but the shift is real. Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/04/chatgpt-in-neovim-collab urn:xianxu:personal:chatgpt-in-neovim-collab Introducing Parley.nvim: a Neovim plugin that turns chatting with an LLM into a living, editable transcript. Trees of follow-up questions, annotations, and context compaction via assistant-summarized lines — built collaboratively with Claude Code. Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/04/claude-code urn:xianxu:personal:claude-code First real run with Claude Code: 500 lines of Lua changes from someone who hadn't written a line of it before. Not AGI, not a junior engineer replacement — a powerful, imprecise statistical machine that makes knowledge workers dramatically more effective. Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/04/chatgpt-in-neovim urn:xianxu:personal:chatgpt-in-neovim The stock ChatGPT app is awful for organizing long research threads. Running gp.nvim in Neovim instead — full transcript, freely editable, customizable syntax highlighting — turns a chat into the building blocks of a real research report. Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/04/culture-wa urn:xianxu:personal:culture-wa Six years inside WhatsApp's improbably quiet Menlo Park building, where the motto was Keep It Simple and the F word was Focus; and where you hot-loaded code straight into production, no code review. It worked. Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/02/astro-photo urn:xianxu:personal:astro-photo Notes from the Death Valley Dark Sky Festival — amino acids in meteorites, planets around every star, and the practical limits of a Leica Q2 capped at 8 seconds of exposure when you really want twenty. Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/02/money-power-happiness-at-work urn:xianxu:personal:money-power-happiness-at-work Five aspects worth weighing when picking a career or changing jobs: money, power, domain, people, growth. And one last gut check — are you having fun? If Mondays don't energize you more often than not, you're probably in the wrong place. Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/01/githubio-blogging urn:xianxu:personal:githubio-blogging How to run a GitHub Pages blog from a private staging repo with a publish.sh script — drafts in private, posts in public, and an identity that's not trivially traceable back to you. A practical walk-through, not a manifesto. Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/01/dot-files urn:xianxu:personal:dot-files A new-Mac setup checklist for the terminal-and-Neovim crowd: Ghostty, zsh, Oh My Zsh, yadm for dotfiles, Homebrew bundles, and the AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI) now sitting alongside the classics. Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://xianxu.dev/2025/01/hello-world urn:xianxu:personal:hello-world A short note on why I'm starting to write things down — partly the urge to document, partly a reaction to the Elon-beast-mode mood of the moment. The rest will follow. Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT