Notes from translating 11 classic CS papers with Codex. What changed the economics was not one-click translation, but a checked pipeline that pulled PDFs, OCR, terminology, citations, code, formulas, and web layout into the same workflow.
To read classic papers more comfortably, I used Codex to build an agentic translation flow: PDF -> Markdown -> Chinese translation -> terminology cleanup -> cross-references. AI translation is not magic. It is closer to putting translation, editing, proofreading, and layout into one pipeline.
A reread of Richard Gabriel's Worse Is Better: why systems that are less perfect but easier to implement and spread often win adoption first, and why mature ecosystems later need The Right Thing to repair them.
Now that AI coding has crossed into production, programmers are becoming one of the earliest white-collar groups facing large-scale replacement. Productivity is surging, headcount is shrinking, and behind the excitement there is not just a growth story but a quieter elimination process.
Four years ago I moved the blog from Hexo to WordPress out of laziness. Four years later, out of a different kind of laziness, I moved it back to a static site. Even more absurdly, this migration write-up itself was also generated on the side during the migration conversation.