---
title: '2025 July Thought Notes'
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date: 2025-07-31T23:59:59+08:00
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weight: 1
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type: posts
author: ["Xinwei Xiong", "Me"]
keywords: []
tags:
  - Blog
  - Monthly Notes
  - Personal Reflection
  -  Summer Adventures
  - Deep Thinking
categories:
  - Growth
description: >
    July 2025 monthly reflection - diving deep into summer adventures, philosophical contemplations, and the art of balancing action with reflection.
tldr:
  - "Excessive human experience constraints limit AI agent performance; general methods with high-level goal-setting outperform over-engineered rules."
  - "Focus emerges naturally from genuine obsession and meaning rather than discipline alone; cultivate compelling problems that capture intrinsic curiosity."
  - "Japanese aesthetic philosophy and cultural practices offer alternative frameworks for finding beauty, meaning, and mindful solitude through acceptance of impermanence."
---

# July 2025 Thought Notes

## Vibe Coding: Are Human Experiences the Shackles of AI Agents?

> July 1st, 2025 - 11:39:24
> In Agent development, "The Bitter Lesson" remains equally important. Excessive human experience injection might actually limit AI performance and lock in product possibilities.
> 

- **Embrace Agent Patterns**: Agent mode is mature; what we need is training agents' thinking patterns. We can focus more on ideas and design, becoming architects rather than coders.
- **Beware Over-Prescription**: Excessive rule-setting (like fixed testing processes) may prevent AI from utilizing the latest model capabilities. We should let AI self-select more often.
- **Context-Dependent Experience**: Experience has scenario dependency. Over-reliance on experience constrains LLM performance; moderate injection as "heuristic guidance" is sufficient.

This insight challenges traditional software engineering approaches in the AI era. **The "bitter lesson" teaches us that general methods leveraging computation ultimately outperform human-designed heuristics.** In agent development, this means resisting the urge to over-engineer constraints based on our past experiences.

**The paradigm shift**: From detailed instruction-giving to high-level goal-setting. Instead of teaching AI *how* to solve problems, we should focus on clearly communicating *what* problems to solve and *why* they matter.

*#Understanding/AI*

## The Essence of Bookmarking: Finding Future Use Cases for Present Information

> July 1st, 2025 - 15:19:47
> Why do we bookmark?
> 

1. **Memory Aid**: Convenient for future possible retrieval.
2. **Psychological Comfort**: Adding to ourselves, even if it doesn't truly add much.
3. **Future Reserve**: Preparing for later.
4. **Cognitive Investment**: Investing in "cognitive assets" for future self.
5. **Value Judgment**: We only bookmark information we consider valuable.

**What kind of information has value? Information useful for future scenarios has value.**

The paradox of information hoarding in the digital age: **We collect far more than we consume, yet the act of collecting itself shapes our thinking.** The curation process—deciding what's worth keeping—is often more valuable than the kept content itself.

**Modern bookmarking reflects an anxiety about forgetting and a hope about future relevance.** We bookmark not just for utility, but for identity—the articles we save reflect who we think we are and who we aspire to become.

The real question isn't "Will I use this?" but "What does choosing to save this say about my current priorities and future aspirations?" **Our bookmarks become archaeological records of our evolving interests and concerns.**

*#Understanding/Information*

## Focus as a Byproduct of Obsession

> July 4th, 2025 - 09:15:33
> Stop looking for the secret to focus. Start looking for the question that keeps you awake at night.
> 

**Focus might just be a byproduct of obsession.** When we're truly captivated by something, concentration becomes effortless. The struggle for focus often indicates we're working on the wrong problems or approaching the right problems from the wrong angle.

**The modern focus crisis isn't about discipline—it's about meaning.** In a world of infinite options, our attention scatters not because we lack willpower, but because we lack compelling reasons to direct it.

**True focus emerges from:**
- **Intrinsic fascination**: Problems that genuinely capture your curiosity
- **Personal stakes**: Outcomes that matter deeply to your identity or values
- **Clear purpose**: Understanding not just what you're doing, but why it matters
- **Optimal challenge**: Tasks at the edge of your capabilities

The advice "just focus" is like telling someone to "just fall in love." **Both are outcomes of the right conditions, not decisions you can force through willpower alone.**

Instead of fighting distraction, **cultivate obsession.** Find work so compelling that you have to force yourself to stop, not start. When you discover something that naturally commands your attention, you've found the path to sustainable focus.

*#SelfObservation/Growth*

## Japanese Aesthetic Philosophy: Mono no Aware, Yugen, and Wabi-Sabi

> July 5th, 2025 - 14:22:18
> The Tale of Genji didn't just reflect Japanese culture—it helped create it.
> 

**Mono no Aware (物哀)**: The pathos of things, bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Not sadness about endings, but appreciation for the preciousness that impermanence creates. Cherry blossoms are beautiful precisely because they fall.

**Yugen (幽玄)**: Subtle grace, understated elegance. The beauty found in suggestion rather than statement, in what's implied rather than explicit. Like seeing moonlight through clouds—the obstruction enhances rather than diminishes the beauty.

**Wabi-Sabi (侘寂)**: Finding beauty in imperfection and impermanence. The crack in the tea bowl becomes part of its character. Asymmetry, weathering, and irregularity as sources of aesthetic appreciation.

These concepts shaped not just Japanese art, but Japanese consciousness. **The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu around 1000 CE, didn't just describe these sensibilities—it cultivated them in readers across centuries.**

**How literature shapes culture**: Great works don't just reflect their time; they create templates for experience. They teach people how to feel, what to notice, how to interpret life's events. **Genji gave the Japanese vocabulary for nuanced emotional states and aesthetic experiences.**

In our contemporary context, these Japanese aesthetics offer counterpoints to Western emphasis on permanence, perfection, and explicit expression. **They suggest alternative ways of finding beauty and meaning—through acceptance rather than control, suggestion rather than statement, imperfection rather than flawlessness.**

*#Understanding/Culture*

## Coffee Shops as Packaged Solitude

> July 8th, 2025 - 16:45:29
> Japanese coffee culture perfects the art of being alone together.
> 

Japanese coffee shops offer something unique: **"packaged solitude."** Unlike Western cafes that encourage socializing, or Chinese tea houses built for conversation, Japanese kissaten create spaces for beautiful aloneness.

**The aesthetic of productive solitude**: Carefully designed environments that make being alone feel intentional rather than lonely. The background hum of other people provides just enough social energy without social obligation.

**Four types of cafe experiences**:
1. **Social spaces** (Western style): Designed for interaction and community
2. **Work spaces** (American style): Optimized for productivity and WiFi
3. **Aesthetic spaces** (Japanese style): Curated for contemplation and solitude
4. **Cultural spaces** (Traditional): Embedded in local customs and rituals

Japanese coffee culture recognizes that **solitude is a skill that requires practice and proper environment.** Just as we design spaces for collaboration, we can design spaces for reflection.

**The philosophy**: Not all alone time is the same. Lonely solitude depletes; chosen solitude restores. **The difference lies in intention, environment, and framing.** When solitude becomes an aesthetic choice rather than a social failure, it transforms from isolation into cultivation.

This reflects broader Japanese cultural wisdom about **finding beauty in states that Western culture often views as problems to solve.** Sometimes the goal isn't to connect more, but to be alone more skillfully.

*#Understanding/Culture*

## The "I-Thou" vs. "I-It" Relationships

> July 21st, 2025 - 20:18:44
> Martin Buber's distinction between two fundamental ways of relating: treating others as subjects or objects.
> 

**"I-It" relationships**: Functional, transactional, instrumental. We interact with others as means to ends—the barista who makes our coffee, the driver who takes us places, the colleague who provides information.

**"I-Thou" relationships**: Authentic, mutual, existential. We encounter others as full beings with their own inner worlds, deserving of respect and recognition independent of their utility to us.

**The modern challenge**: Digital communication and urban anonymity make "I-It" relationships easier and more common. We can go entire days interacting with people primarily as functions rather than persons.

**A practical test of character**: How do you treat people who have no power to help or harm you? The person whose order you accidentally bumped into, the janitor in your building, the stranger asking for directions.

**Moving from "It" to "Thou"**:
- **Presence over efficiency**: Sometimes the "inefficient" choice—making eye contact, asking how someone is and waiting for a real answer—is the human choice
- **Curiosity over utility**: Interested in others for who they are, not what they can do
- **Recognition over transaction**: Seeing the person behind the role

**The paradox**: "I-Thou" relationships often prove more practically valuable than "I-It" ones, but only when we're not seeking that value. **Authenticity can't be instrumentalized without losing its authenticity.**

This philosophy becomes especially relevant in AI-augmented work environments where **human connection becomes the differentiating value we bring to professional relationships.**

*#SelfObservation/Relationships*

## Cities in Their Youth: Vietnam's Wild Growth Period

> July 15th, 2025 - 11:33:17
> Ho Chi Minh City feels like a city in its wild adolescence—chaotic, energetic, full of possibility and contradictions.
> 

**Urban lifecycle theory**: Cities, like organisms, have developmental phases:

**1. Foundation Phase**: Infrastructure building, basic services, population attraction
**2. Growth Phase**: Rapid expansion, economic opportunity, creative chaos
**3. Maturation Phase**: Refined systems, cultural establishment, reduced volatility
**4. Preservation Phase**: Maintaining character, managing decline, historical consciousness

**Ho Chi Minh City exemplifies the Growth Phase**: 
- **Economic dynamism**: Small businesses flourishing, entrepreneurial energy everywhere
- **Infrastructure lag**: Growth outpacing planning, creative solutions to urban challenges
- **Cultural fluidity**: Old traditions mixing with global influences
- **Optimistic chaos**: Disorder that feels productive rather than destructive

**The positive feedback loop**: GDP growth → increased urban investment → better infrastructure → attracts more talent and capital → further GDP growth.

**Why "youthful" cities matter**: They offer something mature cities struggle to maintain—**genuine opportunity for transformation.** In established cities, systems are optimized but roles are fixed. In growing cities, there's still room to shape what becomes.

**The trade-off**: Youthful cities offer dynamism but lack refinement. Mature cities offer sophistication but limited mobility. **The art is recognizing which phase suits your current life needs and aspirations.**

For young professionals and entrepreneurs, **being in a city during its growth phase can be transformative—you grow together with the urban environment.** Your personal development synchronizes with the city's development.

*#Understanding/Culture*

## Resilience as Core Identity

> July 13th, 2025 - 22:47:15
> "My base color is resilience" — a moment of self-recognition.
> 

**The moment of clarity**: Sometimes self-understanding arrives not through analysis but through simple recognition. Like looking in a mirror and suddenly seeing yourself clearly.

**Resilience vs. other potential "base colors"**:
- **Creativity**: Driven by novel expression and original thinking
- **Ambition**: Motivated by achievement and status advancement  
- **Compassion**: Oriented toward helping and connection
- **Curiosity**: Energized by learning and exploration
- **Resilience**: Sustained by the ability to recover and adapt

**What resilience as identity means**:
- **Recovery-oriented**: Setbacks become data, not verdicts
- **Process-focused**: More interested in sustainability than sprint performance
- **Adaptation-positive**: Change becomes opportunity for growth
- **Anti-fragile**: Stress makes you stronger rather than breaking you

**The liberation**: When you recognize your core strength, you stop trying to be someone else. **You optimize for your actual capabilities rather than your aspirational ones.**

**Resilience in the AI era**: As artificial intelligence handles more routine cognitive work, **human resilience becomes more valuable—the ability to navigate uncertainty, recover from failures, and adapt to rapid change.**

**The deeper question**: Is this base color innate or developed? Perhaps it doesn't matter. **What matters is recognizing it, accepting it, and building a life that leverages rather than fights your essential nature.**

*#SelfObservation/Identity*

## The Fluency Bias: Why Our Brains Prefer Forgetting

> July 18th, 2025 - 09:24:51
> Memory isn't a recording—it's a reconstruction. And that's a feature, not a bug.
> 

**The fluency bias**: Our brains are designed for efficiency, not accuracy. We prefer smooth, confident recall over hesitant but accurate memory. **This creates systematic distortions in how we remember events, decisions, and even our own past preferences.**

**Why forgetting is essential**:
- **Cognitive efficiency**: Full recording would overwhelm processing capacity
- **Emotional regulation**: Some memories are healthier when they fade
- **Identity flexibility**: Forgetting allows us to change without being imprisoned by our past
- **Pattern recognition**: General principles matter more than specific instances

**The reconstruction process**: Each time we remember something, we're rebuilding it from fragments, influenced by:
- **Current emotional state**: Happy people remember more positive events
- **Recent experiences**: New information colors old memories
- **Social context**: Others' versions influence our own recollections
- **Identity needs**: We remember in ways that support our current self-concept

**Practical implications**:
- **Journal with awareness**: Written records preserve what memory would naturally edit
- **Question confident memories**: The clearest recollections are often the most distorted
- **Embrace uncertainty**: "I think I remember..." is more honest than "I clearly remember..."

**The paradox**: **Perfect memory would make learning harder, not easier.** Forgetting irrelevant details helps us extract useful patterns. **The goal isn't total recall but intelligent forgetting.**

This insight becomes crucial as we integrate AI systems with perfect memory into our daily lives. **The challenge isn't making AI forget like humans, but learning to use AI's perfect memory wisely without losing our human capacity for adaptive forgetting.**

*#Understanding/Cognition*

## AI Era Programming: What We Lose and Gain

> July 31st, 2025 - 23:58:42
> As we close July, reflecting on how AI coding assistance is reshaping what it means to be a programmer.
> 

**What we're losing**:
- **Syntax mastery**: Deep knowledge of language quirks and edge cases
- **Implementation details**: Understanding how libraries work internally
- **Debugging intuition**: Pattern recognition from writing similar bugs
- **Memory training**: Keeping complex systems in working memory
- **Incremental building**: The satisfaction of constructing solutions step-by-step

**What we're gaining**:
- **Architectural thinking**: Focus shifts from "how" to "what" and "why"
- **System design**: More time for high-level structure and relationships
- **Creative exploration**: Rapid prototyping enables more experimentation  
- **Domain expertise**: Energy freed for understanding business problems
- **Communication skills**: Prompt engineering as precision thinking
- **Quality focus**: AI handles routine implementation, humans ensure correctness

**The role evolution**: From **coder to architect**, from **implementer to designer**, from **syntax expert to system thinker**.

**The new core skills**:
1. **Problem decomposition**: Breaking complex challenges into clear components
2. **System reasoning**: Understanding how parts interact and influence each other
3. **Quality evaluation**: Recognizing good solutions and identifying problems
4. **Communication precision**: Articulating requirements and constraints clearly
5. **Domain bridging**: Translating between technical and business needs

**The philosophical shift**: Programming becomes more like **directing than performing**. We guide intelligent systems rather than manually implementing every step.

**The opportunity**: **More time for creativity, less time on mechanics.** AI handles the translation from intention to implementation, freeing humans for the work that requires intuition, creativity, and deep understanding.

**The challenge**: Staying grounded in technical reality while working at higher levels of abstraction. **Understanding enough about implementation to guide it wisely, even when we don't write it ourselves.**

As we enter August, this evolution continues accelerating. **The programmers who thrive will be those who embrace the shift from craftspeople to architects, from builders to designers.**

*#Understanding/AI*

---

## Reflections on July's Intellectual Journey

July marked a significant deepening in several key areas of understanding:

**Technical Evolution**: Witnessing and adapting to the rapid transformation of software development through AI assistance. The role of programmers is fundamentally changing from implementation specialists to architectural thinkers and system designers.

**Cultural Immersion**: Deep exploration of Japanese aesthetic philosophy provided frameworks for understanding beauty, impermanence, and meaning that contrast productively with Western approaches to achievement and permanence.

**Cognitive Science**: Understanding memory as reconstruction rather than recording offers profound implications for how we learn, decide, and maintain identity in an information-rich world.

**Urban Development**: Experiencing cities in their "growth phase" provided insights into how environments shape opportunity and how timing affects personal development trajectories.

**Relational Philosophy**: Martin Buber's I-Thou framework offers practical guidance for maintaining human dignity in increasingly automated and transactional social environments.

**Focus and Meaning**: The realization that focus emerges from obsession rather than discipline suggests redirecting energy from fighting distraction toward cultivating genuine fascination with meaningful problems.

As August approaches, these insights integrate into a worldview that balances **technological optimization with human wisdom, efficiency with meaning, individual growth with cultural understanding**.

The month's exploration reinforced a core theme: **In a world of rapid change, the most valuable human capabilities are those that complement rather than compete with artificial intelligence—creativity, wisdom, emotional intelligence, and the ability to find meaning in experience.**