Lightning Update

published: October 31, 2025 estimate: 2 min read view-cnt: 5 views

I am stumped.

It’s been a while since the last time I wrote something “authentically new”.

Time flies every time I look back, but it hits even harder when I lose track.

What I’ve accomplished this week seems minimal. It’s hilarious to think that I’ve always claimed to pursue “minimalism”.

At the end of the day, pragmatism and integrity are more valuable than minimalism.

A harsh reminder for my future self of what happens when I lose focus:

First Symptom: published three AI-generated articles due to my lack of talent

two articles for fullstack developers who lack proficiency in either front-end or back-end
- it was inspired by the fact that I spent almost a day refactoring my minimal stylesheet
one article about configuring applications with long development periods
- it was inspired by the fact that I spent half a day configuring Lynx to view images in an external viewer

Second Symptom: spent time on the wrong things that barely have any rewards

I spent two straight days trying to refactor the “My Used Page” series. There were two motivations originally:

The end result was minimal. Lessons learned:

an article’s appeal is mostly determined once the subject is decided
- thus, you only have limited space for improvement
An LLM cannot help generate new content in a retrospective article; the content and creativity basically depend on YOU.
LLMs tend to ask for more context to make the article “more attractive”
- which unfortunately contradicts one of my goals to shrink the length of the article
- that is why My Used Page, Part Two grew 50% longer after the improvement
JUST DON’T DO IT
- only ask an LLM for grammar correction, idiomatic rephrasing, or logical flaws (NEVER try more than these things!)

I know there’s still something worth trying, but at this point, I won’t try to make a retrospective article more attractive.

That’s all.
Hope someone learns a thing or two. See you in the next one!