AI Engineering · Product Judgment · Long-form Writing
Roark Li
Senior software engineer and long-form writer with a decade of development experience. I focus on turning AI demos into useful products, while writing about software quality, product judgment, and independent creation.
Articles
When a Book Is Correct—and Still Leaves You Empty-Handed
A reading note on Fabio Parasecoli’s Food: how general knowledge moves from information to judgment and action, and why not every book deserves to be finished.
The Real Cost of Tokens Is Not the Bill. It Is the Efficiency of Intelligence.
Tokens are not free consumables. They are the energy unit, budget unit, and efficiency metric of AI applications. A mature AI product does not only chase stronger models; it puts the right tokens on the right tasks and consistently converts them into measurable results.
What Do We Mean When We Say Taste Matters Most for Developers in the AI Era?
AI makes code cheaper, but it does not make good software cheaper. Developer taste is not aesthetic superiority; it is a practical sense of standards formed across real needs, tradeoffs, engineering responsibility, and user perception.
Projects
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Occasional updates on new essays, research themes, and public projects. Low frequency, only when there is something worth continuing.