Picking fights I'm not qualified for.
Tongji Arch / miHoYo combat design / English from 0 / code from 0 / now AI.
1000+ games. Building a One-person company.
I keep picking fights I'm not qualified for. Here's the list:
Got into Tongji (China's #1 architecture program) on my second try. First from my school to make it.
Joined miHoYo with zero CS background. Became a combat system designer.
Couldn't speak English at 32. Took IELTS 4 times. TOEFL 5 times. Got a 6.5 and moved to Canada.
Started a CS master's at 34. Graduated at 36.
Played 1000+ games along the way. Mostly hiding from whatever terrifying thing I was supposed to be doing.
Now 37, building a one-person AI company. A platform where humans direct AI to create stories.
No co-founder. No funding. AI agents are my team.
I'll share the build here — what I learn about vibe coding, AI agents, and running a company where most of your employees aren't human.
If your career path also looks like a bug, not a feature — welcome.
Lovable 的设计负责人 Felix Haas 在社交媒体上分享了一篇关于"AI 时代高效团队"的观察,七条经验总结,来自这家增长速度惊人的 AI 创业公司内部视角。
几条有意思的观点:
第一,别像员工一样等安排。影响力最大的人不问"这归谁管",看到问题直接上手。主人翁意识不是靠分配的,只能靠自己拿。
第二,招人看态度不看简历。技能当然重要,但光有技能几乎不能预测一个人能不能成事。真正跑出来的人靠的是好奇心、韧劲和学什么都愿意学的心态。在 AI 时代,这一点比过去更明显。
第三,好奇心和沉迷 AI 是两回事。真正用好 AI 的人不是天天刷资讯,而是不断去试那些没人让他试的东西,追那些可能根本走不通的想法。大多数人不会这么做,但少数坚持的人,回报是指数级的。
第四,让资深的人重新动手。这是 Haas 觉得最有意思的现象:经验丰富的管理者重新变成了 builder(建造者)。AI 让个体贡献者的杠杆效应急剧放大,一个深度使用 AI 的资深工程师或设计师,可能是当下公司里最强大的组合。
第五,自我意识是速度的敌人。Haas 说他从没见过自我意识让公司变快,但见过它让公司变慢。最快的团队不太在意谁拿功劳,只在意什么方案有效。
第六,先发布再迭代。一周的内部讨论,抵不上一天的真实用户反馈。最强的团队不追求发布前完美,而是追求尽快学到东西。发布本身就是他们学习的方式。
这些观点单独看并不新鲜,不过 Lovable 这两年发展的确实不错,2024 年上线,8 个月做到 1 亿美元年收入,2025 年底完成 3.3 亿美元 B 轮融资,估值 66 亿美元,是欧洲增长最快的 AI 公司之一。
尤其是“让资深的人重新动手”这一条,可能是 AI 时代最容易被忽视的组织变化。当 AI 工具足够强大,过去被提拔到管理岗、远离一线的高手,重新获得了亲手做事的能力和动力。
Best accounts to follow from each frontier lab to stay constantly up to date
Anthropic
@karpathy
- must-follow account for AI; recently joined Anthropic
@bcherny
- Claude Code creator, always shares great tips
@trq212
- also a Claude Code developer; writes amazing articles on CC
OpenAI
@polynoamial
- works on reasoning research, shares a lot of technical details
@gabriel1
- Sora developer, great career path
@jxnlco
- works on dev experience, shares a lot about Codex
Google AI
@OfficialLoganK
- all the major Google Gemini and AI Studio updates
@ammaar
- product and design; shares great things about vibe-coding in Google AI Studio
@fofrAI
- cool use cases for generative models
Cursor
@leerob
- the loudest voice behind Cursor updates
@ericzakariasson
- shares great insights on using Cursor
@mntruell
- Cursor’s CEO; major releases and usage updates
xAI
@milichab
- recently joined xAI, shares updates on Grok
@skcd42
- also covers major Grok releases
@ai_explorer25
- covers all ai content and free resources
Seeing a number of benchmarks showing Opus is the best model for long-running work.
Five tips for running Opus autonomously for hours/days:
1. Use auto mode for permissions, so Claude doesn’t ask for approval
2. Use dynamic workflows, to have Claude orchestrate hundreds/thousands of agents to get a task done
3. Use /goal or /loop, to nudge Claude to keep going until it’s done
4. Use Claude Code in the cloud, so you can close your laptop (easiest way is the desktop or mobile app)
5. Make sure Claude has a way to self-verify its work end to end: Claude in Chrome browser extension for web, iOS/Android sim MCP for mobile, a way to start the full web server or service for backend work
As an AI Engineer. Please learn
>Harness engineering, not just prompt engineering
>Context engineering, not just long prompts
>Prompt caching vs. semantic caching tradeoffs
>KV cache management, eviction, reuse, and memory pressure at scale
>Prefill vs. decode latency and why they optimize differently
>Continuous batching, paged attention, and throughput optimization
>Speculative decoding vs. quantization vs. distillation tradeoffs
>INT8, INT4, FP8, AWQ, GPTQ, and when quantization hurts quality
>Structured output failures, schema validation, repair loops, and fallback chains
>Function calling reliability, tool contracts, argument validation, and idempotency
>Agent guardrails, loop budgets, tool budgets, and termination conditions
>Model routing, graceful fallback logic, and degraded-mode UX
>RAG architecture: chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, and freshness
>Retrieval evals: recall, precision, grounding, attribution, and citation quality
>Evals: golden sets, regression tests, adversarial tests, LLM-as-judge, and human evals
>LLM observability as a first-class discipline: traces, spans, tokens, latency, errors, and drift
>Cost attribution per feature, workflow, tenant, and user journey not just per model
>Safety engineering: prompt injection defense, data leakage prevention, and permission boundaries
>Multi-tenant isolation, cache safety, and cross-user context contamination prevention
>Fine-tuning vs. in-context learning vs. RAG vs. distillation and when each is the wrong tool
>Latency, quality, cost, and reliability tradeoffs across the full inference stack
>Production failure modes: hallucinated tool calls, malformed JSON, stale retrieval, runaway agents, and silent eval regressions
Daily Life of Programming with Eyes Closed:
AI: Go check the console errors on the webpage, and you can locate the bug.
Me: You check it yourself.
AI: I can’t see it because the environment is different.
Me: Figure it out yourself.
AI: Let me see if I can find a way... (two minutes later) Bug fixed, all tests passed.
Today we reduced headcount by 22%. The business is the strongest it's ever been. So I think it's important to be direct about what I'm seeing and why.
First, I made this decision and I own it. I did it because the way to operate at the highest level of productivity is changing, and to win the future, ClickUp needs to change with it.
Second, this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay. We'll be introducing million-dollar salary bands. If you create outsized impact using AI, you'll be paid outside of traditional bands.
Most importantly, I have the deepest gratitude for those affected. We're doing this from a position of strength specifically so we can take care of people properly. Everyone affected receives a package aimed at honoring their contributions and easing the transition.
I only see two options: wait for this to play out gradually in the market or be honest about what I'm seeing and act proactively.
THE 100X ORGANIZATION
The primary change is that we're restructuring around what I call 100x org. The goal is 100x output. The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago.
Incremental improvements to existing systems won't get us there. We need new ones. That means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken.
The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn't. Many of the workflows of today, if left unchanged, create bottlenecks in AI systems.
These roles will evolve. But waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now.
The 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people - infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working.
THE BUILDERS, AGENT MANAGERS, AND FRONT-LINERS
— THE BUILDERS: 10X ENGINEERS
I don't think most companies have internalized what's actually happening with AI in engineering. The common narrative is that AI makes all engineers more productive. That may be true in isolation, but at an organization level - that is the farthest thing from reality.
Here's what we've validated recently at ClickUp: the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment.
AI makes the best engineers wildly more productive, and everyone else using AI slows these engineers down.
Think about it - the bottlenecks are (1) orchestration - telling AI what to do, and (2) reviewing - what AI did. Everything is leapfrogged and no longer needed.
So who do you want orchestrating and reviewing code?
And how do you want your best engineers to spend their time?
If your best engineers are spending time reviewing other people's code, then this is inherently an inefficient bottleneck. These engineers can review their agent's code much faster than reviewing human code.
The new world is about enabling your 10x engineers to become 100x.
The wrong strategy is to push every engineer to use infinite tokens. Companies doing this are celebrating 500% more pull requests. But customer outcomes don't match the volume of code being generated.
I call this the great reckoning of AI coding, and every company will face this soon if not already.
More code is just another bottleneck to the best engineers, and ultimately to your company's impact as well.
— THE BUILDERS: 10X PRODUCT MANAGERS
Product management and design roles are merging.
Designers that have customer focus, become more like product managers.
And product managers that have intuition for UX become more like designers.
The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results.
The bottleneck of product <> design iteration is also gone. The product builder iterates on their own, along with agents and skills that ensure alignment with quality and strategy.
Also controversial today - I believe that the wrong strategy is to have your PMs shipping code - that just introduces another bottleneck that the best engineers will waste their time on.
To be clear, PMs should be coding but they should do this in a playground to iterate, validate, and scope. That code should not go to production.
Everything outside of managing systems, orchestrating AI, and reviewing output becomes a bottleneck.
That's why the other roles that are critical along with these are the systems managers (to reduce bottlenecks) along with a bottleneck you can't replace - customer meeting time.
— THE SYSTEM MANAGERS
Ironically, the people that automate their jobs with AI will always have a job. They become owners of the AI systems - agent managers. We have many examples of these people at ClickUp.
The underlying systems in which we operate are absolutely critical to get right. I think most companies are delusional to think they can iterate on existing systems and compete in this new world.
You must create enough disruption so that old systems are deprecated entirely. If there's any definition for 'AI native' that's what it is.
— THE FRONT-LINERS
In a world that will become saturated with AI communication, the human touch will matter more than anything to customers.
This is a bottleneck that you shouldn't replace - even when agents are high enough quality to do video meetings.
One-on-one meeting time with customers is something that shouldn't be automated. The systems around the meetings should be - so that front-liners spend nearly 100% of their time with customers.
REWARDING 100X IMPACT
In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go?
In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it.
We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them.
You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace.
Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems.
THE FUTURE
Nearly every company will make changes like these. The ones that do it proactively will define what comes next.
The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it. We're already seeing entirely new roles emerge, like Agent Managers, that didn't exist a year ago.
ClickUp is positioning to lead this shift, not just internally, but for our customers too. I've never been more certain about where we're headed.
In a recent batch talk, YC General Partner @t_blom broke down how to build a self-improving, AI-native company.
He walks through how to create recursive, self-improving AI loops, and why founders who get this right will run companies that improve while they sleep.
00:00 — Companies Are Roman Legions
00:54 — Copilots Are the Wrong Mental Model
01:55 — Extract the Domain Knowledge
02:24 — The Recursive Self-Improving Loop
04:12 — The Holy Shit Moment at YC
05:50 — Self-Optimizing Product and Support Loops
06:29 — Burn Tokens, Not Headcount
07:23 — Middle Management Is Over
08:05 — Make Everything Legible to AI
09:40 — Regenerating the YC User Manual
11:19 — Software Is Ephemeral, Context Is Valuable
12:18 — Where Humans Still Matter
The 36 BIGGEST startup opportunities right now
1. biggest b2c: solving loneliness. third spaces, community apps, IRL
2. biggest b2b: managed AI employees for businesses
3. biggest overlooked: elder tech. 70 million boomers who want products that make them happier & healthier
4. biggest mobile: action apps that do things, not apps you stare at
5. biggest trades: matching platforms for electricians, plumbers, HVAC. supply shrinking
6. biggest consumer social: small social. group chats as products, no feeds, no ai slop
7. biggest ecommerce: agents that recommend products you'll like, shop, buy for you
8. biggest creator: live shows and unscripted content
9. biggest edtech: AI tutors that adapt through conversation
10. biggest SaaS: pay-per-outcome pricing
11. biggest auto: AI service advisor for dealerships. answers the same 15 questions 24/7
12. biggest talent: training non-technical people to operate agents
13. biggest boredom: curated offline experiences delivered to your door. kits, games, challenges. anti-screen products
14. biggest spiritual: the need for belonging is exploding, new formats of spiritual get togethers
15. biggest wellness: longevity biomarkers you actively manage
16. biggest mobile: action apps that do things, not apps you stare at
17. biggest one to solve ai slop: digital verification that you're a real human. every platform will need this within 2 years
18. biggest infrastructure: agent permissions, security, audit trails
19. biggest media: AI native media companies. build distribution, sell products later.
20. biggest parenting: family ops automation. forms, scheduling, logistics
21. biggest accounting: bookkeeping agents that charge per transaction
22. biggest fashion: brand-owned resale. every brand wants to control their secondary market
23.biggest hobbies: adult learning for joy. pottery, woodworking, drawing.
24. biggest skincare: at-home diagnostics. scan, get a protocol, track progress
25. biggest agriculture: precision farming tools for small farms. enterprise version exists, family farm doesn't
26. biggest pest control: subscription pest prevention instead of reactive treatment. the model flip that lawn care already made
27. biggest regulated: on-device AI. healthcare, legal, finance open up when data stays local
28. biggest gaming: AI characters with real memory and relationships
29. biggest dating: agent-mediated matchmaking
30. biggest fitness: adaptive coaching that rewrites your program daily
31. biggest travel: autonomous trip planning and rebooking
32. biggest food: personalized nutrition based on blood work and gut biome
33. biggest pet: health monitoring. $140B industry, almost no tech
34. biggest defense: AI-native security and compliance tools
35. biggest robotics: physical AI. $30 brains on existing hardware
36. biggest nostalgia: products that feel analog. vinyl, paper, handmade. counter-positioning against AI everything
Recent thoughts:
The Shift to Long-Horizon Tasks
The most likely breakthrough this year will be in long-horizon tasks. We are moving toward a stage where Large Language Models (LLMs) learn to complete extended, complex missions by interacting with Agent environments. This is perhaps where the true value of LLMs lies. Take cybersecurity as an example: imagine a model that continuously hunts for software bugs and vulnerabilities. While it sounds like a search process, it’s actually the model learning the high-level intuition and methodology of a professional hacker. Unlike humans, AI can run 24/7 without fatigue. It could potentially find exploits at a much higher frequwill ency and claim bounties on platforms like HackerOne or BugCrowd. It sounds fun, but fundamentally, it's a revolution that displaces the hacker. If even hackers are being "disrupted," one can only imagine the impact on general programmers.
From One-Person to None-Person Companies
Building on long-horizon capabilities, Autonomous Agent Systems (AAS) will inevitably become the next frontier. Last year, we were discussing the rise of the "One Person Company" (OPC). I didn't expect us to move so quickly toward the "None Person Company" (NPC). It’s an ironic twist—we might all end up as NPCs in this new ecosystem.
Engineering the Impossible: Memory and Learning
To realize the vision above, we must solve three technical pillars: Memory, Continual Learning, and Self-Judging.
I used to think these would require massive paradigm shifts and years of research. However, the pressure from both the technical and application sides is so intense that we are seeing these capabilities emerge through ingenious engineering "tricks":
Memory: Long context windows (1M+) and RAG have significantly bridged the gap.
Continual Learning: While true continual learning remains difficult, the release cycles are shrinking. Global models are updated monthly; domestic models are catching up. If we reach weekly updates by next year, it will effectively function as continual learning.
Self-Judging: This remains the most elusive, yet models like Opus 4.7 are already demonstrating early self-correction and judgment capabilities.
The Self-Evolving Endgame
The most difficult—and most promising—path is Self-Evolution. The current wave is incredibly fierce. I suspect that models like Claude may have already achieved a baseline for self-training: writing their own code, cleaning their own data, generating synthetic data, and then training on it. It might "waste" some compute, but it saves the most precious resources: human labor and time. In the LLM era, speed is everything. Rapid iteration is what creates the cognitive gap between leaders and followers. Claude’s rumored 2-million-chip cluster for next year is likely dedicated to exactly this: autonomous model self-training.
Technical Summary:
1M Context: Necessary baseline.
Memory & Continual Learning: Prerequisites, likely solved first via "tricky" engineering.
Harnessing Environments: The breakthrough point.
Self-Judging: The tipping point.
Full Self-Training: The endgame.
Redefining AGI and the Industry
If this is the road to AGI, then AGI’s definition should be the sum of all human collective intelligence, not just an individual’s intelligence. It must possess the creative capacity to produce something as profound as the "Theory of Relativity"—meeting the bar set by Hassabis.
During this transition, every APP will need to be reconstructed as AI-native. In fact, we might move past the concept of APPs entirely. The most significant challenge will be the reconstruction of the operating system itself. In the future, you won’t see a traditional desktop; you will see an LLM OS, where applications are "generated on demand." This challenges the 80-year-old Von Neumann architecture and represents a total upheaval of the computer science industry.
The Irreversible Wave
From completing long-horizon tasks to fully autonomous operations, every sector—Security, Finance, Law, E-commerce—will be reshaped. Many friends have reached out lately, asking how to transform their enterprises to keep pace with AI. But few truly realize that this irreversible process has already begun. As this massive technical wave hits, we must be prepared to act, but we must also start thinking seriously about how to regulate it.