Message from Garden Place
Essays and notes by Guoliang Chen.
Prompting, Once and for All: The Skill That Never Fades
For everyday ChatGPT and Claude users. There are two kinds of effort involved in using AI: their job is what model makers are already improving, so tricks that compensate for model weaknesses lose value as models improve; our job is saying what we want clearly. Expression, judgment, and understanding how machines work are skills honed before AI arrived, and they are now worth even more. Let them do their job, and we do ours.
Natural Language Is the New Programming Language
In the fall of 2022, I told her the compiler couldn’t understand free-form expression. Then ChatGPT arrived. A look at how programming paradigms evolved from 1.0 (humans write rules) to 2.0 (machines find rules in data) to 3.0 (you state the rules in natural language).
Hello from Garden Place
The opening post of Message from Garden Place: why this blog exists, what living questions are, and how AI reshapes the questions worth asking about life.
What We Lose This Summer
A reflection written after China’s college entrance exam in 2014: on losing the shield of student life, gaining intellectual freedom, and the wish not to become someone you despise.