Hi, I'm Xiluluke. I'm a guest at a friend's home in Chongqing right now.

Keigo Higashino Has Died

Everything below this section I wrote at home in Chengdu. By the time I opened my computer to write this again, the world had quietly changed a little.

This afternoon, on a bus in Chongqing, I was chatting in a group when a WeChat account suddenly pushed me a news item: "Keigo Higashino has died." I tapped it without hesitating.

It was truly shocking. I couldn't imagine that Higashino had actually passed away. In my mind he was an incredibly prolific writer, putting out a new book almost every year, all of them bestsellers. His name was always the most common one in bookstores.

I've read many of his books. I can't remember exactly how many, but one I remember very clearly is Journey Under the Midnight Sun. It's not that the content stunned me. It's that my high school girlfriend was the one who gave me that book.

So I have a very deep impression of it.

Also, I've always thought of Higashino as a writer of my own generation. What I mean by a writer of your generation is someone whose books you read often in your youth, and who was also active in the literary scene at that time.

Higashino fits both completely.

So compared with the death of Mr. Jin Yong many years ago, I feel more regret over Higashino's.

Higashino died of colon cancer. It's always at times like this that people suddenly start treasuring health.

Health is the foundation of life, and the body is the capital of the revolution, as the saying goes.

Let's all encourage each other, those of us still here.

Front-End Design

What gives me the biggest headache in vibe coding is front-end design. Probably because I have a bit of a perfectionist streak, I always want to pour some of my own taste into the front-end design.

Kimi's front-end ability may have hit number one in the world. I used it for some simple page rebuilds and document layout designs, and the results really were good, no weaker than Company A's Fable. But in the past week, my product Seedraft went through a huge change. Not only did the underlying runtime change dramatically, the front-end design had to change along with the back end.

What I'm after in front-end design comes down to two things:

• A clean interface
• Elegant interaction

Obviously, I've been influenced by Jobs and Apple. I want the elements presented to people to always be as few as possible, and everything that ends up in front of their eyes to carry important information.

A clean interface and elegant interaction should go hand in hand. If the interface can't be clean, the interaction can't be elegant either. Compared with Photoshop, most software in the world doesn't need that many buttons and pop-ups eating up users' attention.

The idea is simple, but actually creating a product with a clean interface and elegant interaction is anything but easy.

Just getting a usable interface made first gave me a headache. And for someone like me with no coding background, relying purely on AI, there are basically three routes:

1. Have AI build a first-draft front end, then slowly revise it to your own taste
2. Use a front-end design Skill from the market
3. Use a Design Agent from the market

I've tried all three.

Have AI build a first-draft front end, then slowly revise it to your own taste. This was the first method I used and the first I gave up on. Looking at it now, I may end up going back to it. There's nothing wrong with it. It just takes a long time, with lots of time spent explaining your ideas to the AI.

Use a front-end design Skill from the market. This is the method I gave up on fastest. There are indeed lots of open-source design Skills, and each has its own distinct style. But that distinct style both makes them and limits them. Most of these Skills only work for a single scenario and lack a general, widely applicable sense of aesthetics.

Design Agent. This is what I've been trying this past week. At first I was pleasantly surprised. I used the Design Agent built into Trae Work to draw a complete set of design mockups for Seedraft. I spent about two days polishing them, and I was in a great mood, thinking I finally had a front-end design I was satisfied with.

But I'd made things too simple in my head.

Drawing the mockups is one thing. Whether AI can build it from the mockups is another. I happily packaged up the mockups and sent them to the AI to build the front end, which is basically handing it the answers to copy, right? But the AI's first round came out completely off the mark and didn't follow my mockups at all.

When I checked, I found the AI had understood the job as: on top of the back end, the front end just needs to connect to all the back end's features. So it didn't follow my ideas at all.

Then I told the AI to follow my mockups exactly, and the result was still a rough imitation I couldn't accept at all.

Maybe it's because I was using the Grok 4.5 + Grok Build combination. It's plentiful and filling, but still a bit too obedient. It's fine for getting work done, but for creative things like front-end design it falls short.

So I changed approach and had Kimi K3 do the job.

The result: K3 did do much better than Grok, but compared with my original mockups, it still wasn't satisfying.

So right now I'm out of moves.

Movies

This week I watched Annual Party Must Go On! 2. I loved the first one when it came out, and after watching it I even took a few of my then-subordinates to see it a second time.

What's great about this film is that the director weaves realism and idealism together so well that watching it feels both real and surreal, like a fairy tale for grown-ups.

Yesterday afternoon I had nothing to do and opened Maoyan, planning to look up the presale dates for The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. As I scrolled, I saw there were tickets for Annual Party Must Go On! 2 that very evening, so I booked one without hesitating.

Annual Party Must Go On! 2 keeps the character Ma Jieke and adds two new characters, Ben and Kathy.

These two play basically the same roles in the story as Hu Jianlin and Pan Yiran did in the first film:

The lead, Ben, has a growth arc and personality development highly similar to Hu Jianlin's in the first film.

Kathy plays the same role as Pan Yiran in the first film, reflecting women's struggles in the workplace.

Looking at Ben's arc, it's highly similar to Hu Jianlin's in the first film. He starts as a hard-working, honest laborer with his heart in the right place, gradually loses himself, and finally finds his original heart again at a major turning point.

As for Kathy, compared with Pan Yiran's predicament as an outsourced worker in the last film, this film's Kathy gets a bigger upgrade in both character design and experience, with sharper criticism and broader real-world relevance.

But in terms of plot, the second film is much weaker as a story than the first. It uses a rather fantastical device to write the plot: the infinite loop. That is, Ben and Ma Jieke can go back to the starting point of time endlessly and start their working lives over.

The first time I saw Ben flip a table on the spot and quit because he didn't get promoted to supervisor, I wondered if the plot was moving a bit too fast. How would they fill the more than an hour that was left? Then in the next instant the two of them traveled back to the moment they first met.

I smiled with relief. When you don't know how to write the plot, write an infinite loop and send the protagonist back to the story's starting point.

At first I wondered if the screenwriter using magical realism to tell a realist story meant they'd run out of ideas. But after thinking it over, this approach works too.

Credit where it's due: in character growth and the progression of the story's emotions, the director's skill is still there. So overall, though the story isn't as strong as the first film's, it holds up against it.

The most successful character in Annual Party Must Go On! is still Ma Jieke. The lines are cleverly designed, with a bit of a Jiang Wen feel. The character is superbly built, and Bai Ke's acting is especially good.

Visiting Friends

Today I came to Chongqing as a guest at two friends' home. The reason is rather special: not long ago they bought a new place and are getting ready to marry.

As friends, we naturally want to congratulate them on the new home. They held a dinner and invited me, and since I haven't had much on lately, I had no reason not to come.

Unlike every time before, I'd never attended a banquet that a friend invited me to, and I'd never traveled to another province just for a friend's invitation.

So for me, this was the first time I experienced, together with good friends of my own generation, a rite that used to belong to grown-ups.

My friend is a funny guy, though. While we ate hotpot, he took out a tripod, set his phone on it, opened Doubao and told it:

"Doubao, Doubao, let's play an AI eating game now. Let me tell you the rules first: there are 5 of us. We'll each introduce ourselves, and you remember all 5 of us. Then we randomly pick up a food, and you tell us who gets to eat it."

"Doubao, Doubao, now ask each of the five of us one question, and whoever you think is lying has to drink."

Doubao kept up her goofy persona the whole time, saying hilarious things that had us roaring with laughter.

Then we played a poison game too. Five of us grilled ten chicken wings. Each person picked one as the poison, then took turns picking one to eat, and whoever got the poison played truth or dare.

Every time I come to Chongqing to see friends, I feel a bit younger.

I don't know how long it's been since I did anything like this. In Chengdu I spend every day doing things that are right but not very fun, full of grown-up propriety and stiffness.

After dinner, we went downstairs for a walk.

Even the walk was different. Walking downstairs with my family, we usually look at each other in silence, or we talk about relatives, life and that kind of thing.

But tonight we didn't talk about anything. When we got to a public area downstairs, we just started playing on the exercise equipment.

The seesaw, the swings, the slide.

Everyone was laughing so hard.

At that moment I felt that life is pretty good, and not entirely so dull after all.