The earliest seed of this idea came from a period of insomnia. At the time, I read a book that said journaling or writing things down can help with sleep. The rough idea is that if you write down today’s thoughts and your expectations for the future before going to bed, your brain relaxes more. Then you do not lie in bed tossing and turning with a head full of thoughts. (“Reduce the burden of thinking: write down everyday thoughts and chores. The brain has fewer things to worry about, and more inspiration shows up”, Sheng Xu 2025.) I do think this is true. Human brain capacity is extremely limited. Compared with a GPU cluster, our energy consumption is very low, but our learning ability should not be comparable to a backprop-based model. So we really do not need to compete with large models on memory. We should focus on thinking models and learning models instead. Unimportant things should be written down. There is no need to occupy the cache of the brain.
After LLMs arrived, I realized I had become a little too dependent on them. If something could be solved with an LLM, I would absolutely not think through it myself. Of course, on one hand, efficiency did improve. I learned a lot in a very short period of time. But is this kind of knowledge really useful? No matter how much one person learns, can they learn faster or more than a large model? Maybe what matters more is learning thinking models. On the other hand, because of this dependence, I noticed that my thinking ability and language ability had both declined to different degrees. For example, my writing was not great before either, but now it has become the kind of situation where once I pick up the pen, my brain cannot even squeeze out a few words. Given this situation, and because I recently came across some of Sihuo’s early articles by chance, I realized that maybe at certain times I need to detach from AI to maintain my personal state. One way to do that is to write blog posts without AI. I do not think there is a big so-called difference between Chinese and English, haha. Mixing Chinese and English is probably better.
Besides maintaining my own thinking and language ability, I also want to build a personal knowledge base to record my thoughts at different stages, so that I can review them in the future. This can be traced back to my early investment notes. I forgot where I learned this, but the idea is to write down the thoughts behind every decision, the content of each trading decision, and the later review. This makes reflection much better, because if you do not write things down, human memory is unreliable. Also, I previously saw on someone else’s blog that you can directly use Cursor + Markdown as a RAG system.