Translation on My Space

Ming's Spell Compendium #6 -- A Generalized Curry–Howard Proof Searcher and Program Synthesizer (Crackpotizen Edition)

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:18:37 +0800

“Crackpotizen” combines “crackpot” and “citizen”: formal methods for the rest of us.

This is a cultural adaptation, not a literal translation, of the original Chinese article. The running “crackpot” joke plays on minke (民科), usually dismissive slang for an amateur theorist, and on the author’s name, Ming.

Ming's Spell Compendium #4 -- The Art of Whipping AI Grunts: FP's Great Comeback?

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:00:00 +0800

This is a cultural adaptation — not a literal translation — of the original Chinese article. Recurring coined terms: grunts = AI agents doing the coding labor; boss = the human; whip-iler = a portmanteau of “whip” + “compiler” (the compiler that whips misbehaving grunts back in line).

Previously on… Ming’s Spell Compendium #3 – AI Programming: The Next Chapter

Times Have Changed

Let’s be honest: in more and more projects, the primary author of the code is already AI. Your coworkers have quietly subscribed to Cursor pro plans or OpenAI’s Codex. They toss requirements at the AI every morning, then spend their valuable working hours scrolling Reddit, day-trading meme stocks, nursing their phones back to full charge, ~~and quietly tanking their own projects~~. The human role is shifting from “writing code” to “feeding PRDs to the AI, pretending to review AI code, occasionally deploying some good old workplace gaslighting (‘You don’t want the job? There’s plenty of AI that do.’), and having the AI ghost-write your performance reviews and passive-aggressive emails.”

Ming's Spell Compendium #3 -- AI Programming: The Next Chapter

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:00:00 +0800

This is a cultural adaptation — not a literal translation — of the original Chinese article.

Conflict of interest disclosure: This is not investment advice. I’m not shilling any AI tool or API reseller. Everything here comes from ~$20K worth of token-burning personal experience. Different project types and different coding tastes may lead to different conclusions.

Previously On…

Ming’s Spell Compendium #2 – You Terrifying Upright Apes Are Underestimating Yourselves

In the last installment, we established: AI’s knowledge reserves dwarf any individual’s, but that knowledge is hard to awaken; your ability to discern quality sets the ceiling on output quality; the trigger for better results is always your own growth, not AI’s spontaneous breakthrough.

Ming's Spell Compendium #2 -- You Terrifying Upright Apes Are Underestimating Yourselves

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:37:43 +0800

This is a cultural adaptation — not a literal translation — of the original Chinese article. Some Chinese cultural references have been swapped for Western equivalents that hit the same emotional note.

Previously on… Ming’s Spell Compendium #1 – One Year of Vibe Coding: A Cold Hard Look

Foreword

Humans, you’re selling yourselves short.

How Much Can AI Amplify You?

Last year (2024), my working hypothesis was: even with AI, you can’t dramatically exceed the user’s own ability. If AI’s training data represents the sum total of human knowledge, then the current crop of agentic evangelists would have you believe that professional expertise has become a worthless commodity in this era — because AI can write code like Linus, write novels like Hemingway, etc.

Ming's Spell Compendium #1 -- One Year of Vibe Coding: A Cold Hard Look

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:44:21 +0800

This is a cultural adaptation — not a literal translation — of the original Chinese article. Some Chinese cultural references have been swapped for Western equivalents that hit the same emotional note.

Foreword

Over the past year I’ve burned through more than $10,000 in API tokens across Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. So everything in this article is based on hands-on experience with the strongest models available — Opus 4.6, Codex-5.3-xhigh, Gemini 3 Pro — used without budget constraints.