I Open-Sourced Materialist Dialectics Q&A

Today I open-sourced a little thing I made quite a while ago. It's called "Materialist Dialectics Q&A."

It's an AI Q&A tool, but at its core is materialist dialectics. Whatever you ask, it helps you break the question down from the angle of materialist dialectics.

Ask it "Should I quit my job?" or "My partner and I keep fighting lately. Is this a rough patch, or are we fundamentally not going to make it?" and it uses the materialist dialectics toolkit: grab the principal contradiction, analyze the concrete problem concretely, see what stage the contradiction has turned into. It helps you take things apart and see them clearly.

Where it differs from ordinary AI chat is that it doesn't sit on the fence. It won't tell you "Both sides have a point, it really comes down to what you think." It actually dares to make a call. And after every answer, it also tells you how it reached that judgment: which lines of analysis it used, and which sentence of what you said each one maps to. I'm pretty proud of that part.

I first made it as a perk for subscribers of Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works. The idea was simple: the column is always about using the methods of Selected Works of Mao Zedong to deal with things in life, so why not make a tool people could use right away? Whenever readers were torn about something, they could toss it in and pull it apart. The first version had an API built in, so readers could just open it and use it, and I paid the costs.

The result? Honestly, not many people used it.

That's a bit awkward. Keep paying for it, and nobody uses it. Maintain it as a serious project, and, well, it's basically just a Skill, so that didn't seem worth it either.

The most valuable part of this thing is really the prompt, an analysis framework I spent a long time tuning. There's not much point hiding it. So today I dug it out again and decided to go all the way: open source.

I changed how it works while I was at it. Now it's bring-your-own-key. You enter your own DeepSeek API key and spend your own tokens, and I don't have to front the money anymore (lol).

The numbers are pretty quiet, but I actually love using it myself. Mainly because it often helps me notice one thing: I think I'm torn between A and B, and after it breaks things down, I realize it's a false choice and the real answer is C. When you're stuck inside your own problem, it's very hard to see that layer.

If you're interested, give it a try: