Watercolor: ChatGPT desktop app floating centrally with three mode icons Chat/Work/Codex, a terminal window with scrolling code behind, three geometric shapes representing GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna

Codex Cold Start: From Installation to Your First Command

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. ...

2026-07-13 · 6 min · Alex Wang
Watercolor: person sitting at computer with AI auto-organizing folders, scattered file icons nearby

Day 8: Autonomous AI, Automation Without Writing Code

This is Day 8 of Week 2 in the “AI Path L1→L2 Upgrade Guide.” You should have completed Day 7 first. Day 7 you added error handling to your script. It now runs reliably in real network conditions. But there’s a more fundamental limitation: you still have to write code. Writing code to call APIs is one kind of automation. There’s a lighter one: describe the task, and let AI write the code, run it, and fix the bugs itself. That’s autonomous execution AI. ...

2026-06-28 · 6 min · Alex Wang
Context rot: an easily overlooked problem in AI coding

Context Rot: An Easily Overlooked Problem in AI Coding

Yesterday someone in a group chat said GPT-5.4 performed worse than Doubao. When they asked questions, the model would often give irrelevant answers without even reading the question. I asked a few follow-up questions and found they had fed it a lot of documents, and the conversation had gone on for many turns. This probably wasn’t the model’s problem—it was context rot. I’ve had similar experiences myself. After talking to a model for a long time, it starts “forgetting” what we discussed earlier, or repeats mistakes that were already corrected. The model hasn’t gotten stupider. The conversation has just gotten too long. ...

2026-04-18 · 14 min · Alex Wang
Trust boundary checkpoint between open and constrained AI ecosystems

Trust Boundaries: The Same Idea on Open and Closed Platforms

Fundamentum autem est iustitiae fides, id est dictorum conventorumque constantia et veritas. — Cicero, De Officiis The foundation of justice is fides — constancy and truthfulness in words and agreements. The first two posts told the story of two projects. Aristotle: Teaching AI to Reflect on Its Mistakes runs on OpenCode — three commits, done. claude-code-reflect: Same Metacognition, Different Soil runs on Claude Code — V1 through V3, hitting walls the entire way. ...

2026-04-06 · 16 min · Alex Wang
Same metacognition landing on different platform soils

claude-code-reflect: Same Metacognition, Different Soil

Same metacognitive ability, different soil. The growing patterns look nothing alike. My previous post, Aristotle: Teaching AI to Reflect on Its Mistakes, had three core principles: immediate trigger, session isolation, human in the loop. These sound platform-agnostic. But when I moved the same philosophy to Claude Code, I discovered something: platform differences are much larger than expected. First Hurdle: Plugin System Differences Claude Code’s plugin and OpenCode’s skill are completely different systems. Just getting the plugin installed and recognized took several rounds of struggle. ...

2026-04-06 · 9 min · Alex Wang