OnionTalk

Recently, I realized something uncomfortable: AI is eating my attention. Not in the usual way, like social media or short videos. This is different. It feels productive. It looks productive. There are terminal windows running, agents making changes, files being created, commits stacking up. Everything is moving. But somehow, by the end of the day, nothing is really finished. I had multiple agent coding sessions running at the same time. One was building a feature, another was fixing a bug, another was exploring an idea I suddenly had while waiting. It felt like I was doing a lot. ...

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently — in the Chinese-speaking world and the English-speaking world — talking about harness engineering. Most of them just cover the concept, with very little detail. And honestly, some of the systems described are so complex I can’t believe they’d keep running without crashing. So over the weekend, I built something myself. It’s funny — I’ve built a lot of personal projects, but most of them die within 10 iterations. When I say dead, I mean they spiral: adding a feature causes bugs, fixing those bugs creates more bugs. ...

After the layoff, I suddenly had too much time. Ideas were everywhere, but everything felt vague. Should I grind interviews? Build projects? Try something new? Too many options, and somehow I couldn’t pick one. So I did what most people do — I went into full sprint mode. I tried to smash frontend fundamentals and system design in a week. Late nights, aggressive goals, pushing hard. It worked… for a few days. ...

Today, I want to talk about focus. In today’s information society, focus is actually a very rare quality. There are endless short videos on Tiktok, nonstop articles pushed by influencer, and never-ending posts on X.com . The feed never stops. There is always something new competing for your attention. Many times, even when I am doing important work, I still cannot resist getting distracted and picking up our phone to scroll through social updates. ...