The Broken Promise

At the end of my last post, I made a very clear promise: I was moving on to my real target audience for Fitting Room—my coworker Gigi and my design students.

I broke it. Or rather, I got completely side-tracked.

A whole week has passed, and I haven't even opened the project file. Not a single screen, not a single prompt. The paper-doll outfit app made zero progress. Instead, it sprouted an unexpected side quest, grew into an entire second project, and somehow became this website.

It all started on a Wednesday.

I was catching up online with my brother, a tech founder. I casually mentioned that I had been experimenting with vibe coding using Claude. He listened, told me that a new AI agent could do that kind of thing too, and then made a suggestion: why not start a blog to document the ride?

My immediate reaction: Sure, why not?

Blogging wasn't new to me. I ran a blog for years, though that was a long time ago. But everything I wrote back then was in Chinese. Starting a new blog wasn't what scared me. The terrifying part was that this time, it was going to be in English.

The Expat Chat and the English Barrier

The honest truth is that writing in English has always intimidated me.

I have lived outside Taiwan for more than twenty years: Denver, New York, Shanghai, and now Hong Kong. English is my daily working language and what I speak with friends. But writing personal stories in English, out in the open for anyone to read? That felt like a completely different beast.

Besides, even though I live my life in English, I have never read a single English novel. Reading in Chinese is still far faster and more natural for me. When you don't even consume stories in a language, trying to write your own feels almost absurd.

Writing in English wasn't even my idea. It came from my old gang—the very first group of close friends I made when I moved to Hong Kong, coworkers from my first corporate design firm. Most of them were expats. We spent years hanging out, sharing meals, and surviving the chaos of firm life together. Eventually, life moved on and most of them scattered across the globe, but our WhatsApp chat never died. I'm always dropping chaotic, funny snippets of my daily life into the group, and they've always loved them. For years, they kept telling me: Sophia, you really need to write an English blog.

I laughed it off every time. The thought stressed me out. I pictured myself agonizing over every sentence, trying to sound smart, second-guessing prepositions, and wondering how on earth to translate a joke or a pun without killing the punchline. It felt like way too much friction.

What changed is realizing how much friction AI strips away. I can't write a line of code, yet I was already building software just by talking to Claude. Writing in English could simply be another experiment.

Just like that, the friction evaporated—and the intimidation went with it.

So I tried. And it worked.

Hitting the Wall

My original plan was neat and tidy. I would keep the projects cleanly separated: Claude would handle Fitting Room, and a new AI agent would build the website. Separate lanes.

Then I hit a wall. Repeatedly.

I spent a few days wrestling with the new AI agent, and we ground to a dead halt. No matter how I phrased my prompts, the project simply refused to budge.

When you first start vibe coding, it's easy to fall into a strange kind of stubbornness. I assumed the "proper" way was to pick one AI and stick with it through thick and thin until it delivered. But all that loyalty earned me was a bruised forehead against an immovable brick wall.

Then it hit me: why on earth was I being so loyal? An AI isn't a permanent employee on my payroll that I can't legally fire. Not that I needed to fire anyone anyway. Instead of forcing one tool to do everything, why not treat them like a team? Figure out what each AI agent excels at, match them to how I work, and cross-deploy them. If Colleague A is great at building the site, and Colleague B writes better copy, let them do what they do best. Suddenly, I didn't just have a tool—I had an entire creative department.

So I pivoted. I brought Claude back in to finish building the website, while having the new AI agent help me draft the copy.

Just seven days after that Wednesday chat with my brother, the website went live. It launched with my three Chinese books from the past, alongside my first three blog posts in English. That old blog belongs to my past, for the people who knew me then. This new space is a new era—showing both who I was and who I am now to an English-speaking world.

As for Gigi and my students? Fitting Room is still sitting quietly on my laptop. They still haven't seen a single screen.

The Two-Hour Reader

The day before the site went live, I went hiking with a friend.

As we walked the trail, I mentioned that I was launching my personal blog the next day. His immediate reaction was to laugh and say he'd just ask ChatGPT for a summary. He's the type who routinely uses AI to digest the news and sniff out good restaurants.

I told him: these aren't long, dragging stories. They're quick, easy reads.

The next day, about two hours after I sent him the link, my phone buzzed with a message.

He admitted he'd only been teasing about the AI summary. He had actually sat down and read through the two posts himself. He said the writing felt refreshingly candid and relatable—it made him reflect on his own life and journey. But he also confessed he wouldn't have had the courage to put himself out there so bare and vulnerable.

I was glad he read it for himself instead of relying on a chatbot digest. And as for being so exposed? I texted him right back:

"I'm old enough now that I can be brutally honest!"