Chuanxilu for Skilled Homo sapiens

This is Day 14 of the “AI Path: Advanced Upgrade Guide” Week 3 series. Previous post: Day 13 Practice. Project repo: picture-book-pipeline. Introduction In Day 13, I built a skill through six rounds of conversation. A skill is made of role documents, one per role. The agent works from those documents. How you write them directly dictates the quality of the output. A role document has four blocks: identity, input, output requirements, quality requirements. This post goes through each one. What to write, and why. ...

If you build with, or are thinking of using, OpenCode.ai (oc, for short) for development or agent work, you’ve probably felt this anxiety: worried the models won’t match the official ones, worried the free tier will hit its limit every day, or puzzled over how the Go subscription quota is even calculated, especially with claims floating around about burning through half a month’s quota in 5 minutes. Once DeepSeek V4 Flash (ds4f, for short) stabilized, the token constraint issues became much easier to manage. I analyzed over 3,000 API call logs from my local machine across three months of active usage and cross-checked them against the numbers online. Here’s the truth behind these five misconceptions. Once you get these straight, your workflow runs steadier, and you stop worrying about burning through your token quota. ...

TL;DR: On August 6, 2026, DeepSeek announced that it plans to raise API prices. No single cause: cost pass-through, user filtering, expectation management, free marketing, a shift to value-based pricing, and open-source ecosystem pressure all point at the same move. Rising compute costs are real, but they don’t explain the timing or the form of the announcement. The market is largely moving from winning share with low prices toward value-based pricing, and seven falsifiable signals before the official plan will confirm or overturn this post’s inferences. ...

This is Day 13 of the AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide. Do Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11 and Day 12 first. Day 12 ended with a promise: next practice, run the pipeline once by hand. Two tools working in relay. Today I keep it. I’m not going to show you how to use a ready-made skill workflow. I’ll show you how one is built from zero. The project is picture-book-pipeline, which I use to batch-generate children’s picture books. It turns a workflow into a complete skill kit: a SKILL.md overview, role prompts, and execution scripts, all in one directory. ...

This is Day 12 of the AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide. Do Day 8, Day 10 and Day 11 first. Day 11 ended with a question: how do I automate these steps? Here’s my answer. Pairing stateless API calls with an AI agent is the same kind of work as breaking down workflows, designing systems, and building software. I’ve been doing that kind of work for years. The AI picture book project I’m building right now is a clean example. I’ll walk through how I designed its pipeline and tasks. ...

I’ve been freelancing for three months. At first lunch was the same as office life. Open the delivery app, scroll, pick something, wait. Nothing wrong with it. I’d been doing it for years. The shift wasn’t sudden. First I noticed the monthly delivery bill added up fast. One person ordering has to meet minimums plus packing and delivery fees, and a decent meal runs $6-8. At month’s end it wasn’t pocket change. Then I noticed how heavy the oil and salt were. I’d eat, then crash. Paying money to feel worse. ...

This is Day 11 of the AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide, a practice article. Do Day 8 and Day 10 first. Day 10 ended with a note: description and verification are the same coin. If you can’t describe what you want, you can’t check whether you got it. I default to trusting AI output. Especially the confident ones. Well structured, clear, sounds right. Day 10 mentioned an example: I asked AI to “organize these files by category.” It sorted them alphabetically by name. The result looked organized, it just wasn’t the kind of organization I meant. At the time I thought “I need to describe it better next time,” not “let me check whether what it delivered is actually correct.” ...

This is Day 10 of the AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide. You should complete Day 8 and Day 9 first. I learned this the hard way. “I thought I was clear” is a lie I have told myself more often than I care to admit when prompting AI. I once asked an AI to organize project documents: “Help me sort these files.” What I got back: all .md and .py files mixed together, sorted alphabetically by filename. It did sort them. Just not the way I meant. Another time I said: “Show me the directory structure.” I wanted a tree view. The AI gave me ls -lh output: file sizes, timestamps, permissions. Everything I didn’t ask for. Same request, two completely different results. The gap wasn’t in the tool. It was in how I described what I wanted. A fuzzy description and a clear one can mean the difference between three iterations and zero. Here are three exercises from everyday scenarios. Each starts with a vague version, breaks down what’s missing, and builds up to a clear version. If you read these and think “wait, I write prompts like the vague version too,” that is exactly why this article exists. ...

Prologue: 1,754 perfect green lights Late on the night Aristotle v1.6.0 was shipping, the team watched the test panel. Green indicators lit up like dominoes. Python side: 1,166 assertions. TypeScript side: 588 checks. Total: 1,754 automated test cases. All green. In code terms, that’s cameras and infrared sensors on every wall. A fly couldn’t sneak through without setting off alarms. The team leaned back. The system looked like an iron fortress. ...

This is a bonus article for the “AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide.” If you haven’t set up Codex yet, this guide gets you from zero to running. On July 9, 2026, OpenAI made two announcements at once: GPT-5.6 went public, and Codex was merged into the ChatGPT desktop app. The new desktop app has three modes: Chat, Work, and Codex, all in one app. If you’ve already got the standalone Codex desktop app, it updates in place. Your projects and settings carry over. ...