# Message from Garden Place

> Message from Garden Place — essays and notes by Guoliang Chen

Guoliang Chen, who goes by Freezind online, writes essays and notes from Ebisu, Tokyo, on living and working with AI. Author of the column Live with AI.

Written in three languages: English at /, 中文 at /zh/, 日本語 at /ja/. The same piece in another language is a translation, not a separate post.

Every post carries a growth stage: seedling (an early note), budding (taking shape), evergreen (finished, and kept alive). Evergreen posts get revised, and each shows the date it was last updated.

Full text of every post in one file: https://gardenplace.me/llms-full.txt

## Posts

- [Prompting, Once and for All: The Skill That Never Fades](https://gardenplace.me/posts/the-prompt-trick-that-never-expires.md): 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. (Evergreen · 2026-09-12 · Updated 2026-09-13 · Live with AI)
- [Natural Language Is the New Programming Language](https://gardenplace.me/posts/natural-language-is-the-new-programming-language.md): 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). (Evergreen · 2026-09-04 · Live with AI)
- [Hello from Garden Place](https://gardenplace.me/posts/hello-from-garden-place.md): 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. (Evergreen · 2026-08-22 · Updated 2026-09-11)
- [What We Lose This Summer](https://gardenplace.me/posts/what-we-lose-this-summer.md): 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. (Evergreen · 2014-06-09)

## Series

- [Live with AI](https://gardenplace.me/series/live-with-ai/): We are entering an age in which intelligence can be bought on demand. With bodies shaped by the hunter-gatherer era and ideas inherited from the industrial one, we now hold a new kind of power: to build order in a world of ever-increasing entropy, and to rearrange our own lives. As more and more becomes possible, what deserves our one finite life? Which of the rules we take for granted need a second look? How should we think about work, wealth and time? And how can AI help us waste less on internal friction, turn ideas into reality, and be happier? Live with AI starts from these everyday questions and, combining an understanding of AI with first-hand practice, explores how we could live, and how we truly want to. (2)

## Pages

- [Guoliang Chen](https://gardenplace.me/about/): Guoliang Chen, Earth Online Hacker. Pioneer · Sense · Individuate. Who I am, what I write, and who I read.
- [Colophon](https://gardenplace.me/colophon/): How this site is made: Hugo and PaperMod, self-hosted Rajdhani, hosted on Vercel, mail by Resend.