I’m a very homebound person, and I don’t even know when it started, but “going out” has become a completely unfamiliar term to me. I usually only go out once a month when it’s truly necessary; even then my outings are just a simple two‑point‑one‑line routine, and I often take a car or public transport. Thinking carefully, I realize I haven’t genuinely left a room in a long time. After experiencing the bubbles and anxieties of the AI era, I picked up a bad habit—writing code in the middle of the night, as if I’m no longer in the same “time zone” as the rest of life. This morning I didn’t get up until after noon, I only have two meals a day, and as soon as I wake I sit in my study, turn on the computer and start writing. Writing code itself is still a lot of fun, but coding in the AI era is no longer that. Staring at the screen until the afternoon, I can’t produce anything, lack design inspiration, and feel everything is imperfect.

Outside? {#outside}

At that moment, a long‑forgotten thought of “outside” suddenly popped into my head. It wasn’t any specific place, just a vague feeling, like something I’ve once had in memory: sunshine, wind, grassland, but I can’t quite describe it. The very fact that I can’t describe it makes me a bit uneasy. It just so happened that the weather was nice today, and Claude had hit its session limit, so I closed my notebook, put on my headphones, grabbed a bottle of water and stepped outside. Yes, I went out with my MacBook Air. I basically thought I’d go to a different spot to keep writing, maybe I could find some inspiration?

After exiting the community gate, I walked along the street to the intersection with the main road, and the wind between the two buildings suddenly poured in. I stood there, stunned, “Wind”!? How long has it been since I felt something like this; it’s not the air‑conditioner’s breeze, not the fan’s breeze, but that irregular, warm yet slightly gentle breeze that blows from far away, a breeze with sound; accompanied by the noisy city‑street wind. At that moment I was wearing AirPods and listening to music, and the outdoor feeling made me instinctively turn off the noise‑cancellation. I held a bottle of water in my left hand and cradled the notebook in my right, walking along the main road toward the riverbank. This time I didn’t stare at my phone screen, and I don’t know why—I just wanted to get to the riverbank first.

Invisible

After walking about one or two hundred meters, we reached the riverbank. The stone railing beside the sidewalk was a bit wide, just enough to hold a laptop. I wasn’t really planning to code here—just being at the river after a long time out, I first took a photo with my phone. After taking it, I realized the outdoor vibe was decent, so I casually pulled out my MacBook, propped it on the railing, and after unlocking the screen it was filled with editors and terminals. I don’t know why, but I thought of posting a tweet, something like the classic shot of someone opening a MacBook on a snowy mountain or while fishing, the screen filled with IDEs and Terminal, captioned “what can stop you coding like this”. I quickly abandoned the idea, because the 25‑inch MBA’s LCD screen brightness is just too low.

A photograph shows a dark-colored laptop, screen off and reflecting a rippled purplish sheen, perched open on top of a stone or concrete pillar overlooking a wide, muddy-brown river. The far bank holds a hazy skyline of low-rise buildings, cranes, and a cable-stayed structure with a red mast, all softened by overcast, misty daylight. To the right a metal railing runs along a paved embankment, and a small boat with a red marker floats alone on the water toward the left. The overall scene reads as a casual outdoor photo of a laptop set against a riverside city backdrop, likely taken to showcase the device's design against a scenic, moody backdrop.

As soon as I opened the screen, I knew it was over. Guoguo's screen brightness is simply insufficient for outdoor viewing. I tried a few different angles—back‑lit, with the light, even aligning myself on the same line as the sun—but no matter how I adjusted, I couldn't see clearly. Honestly, it's pretty pitiful. Indoors I still felt like a programmer, but outside I discovered the screen wouldn't light up at all. Fine, I could just not write the code, but I wasn't giving up; I closed the laptop and decided to try my luck under the shade of a tree across the street. Before leaving the railing, I glanced at the river again. From a distance it actually looked okay; on a cloudy day with sunshine the water surface still looked like the memory. But when I lowered my gaze a bit toward the shore, I could see a layer of stuff floating on the surface—algae, leaves, bits of debris. Not much, but the river water was already not clear; the surface was still as still as in memory, but the shore was clearly neglected, “早几年疫情的时候我其实就出来看过，自那时候起其实就这样了”But every time I pass by I still feel a little sentiment.

A photograph taken from an elevated riverside promenade, looking out over a wide, calm expanse of grayish-brown river water under an overcast, hazy sky. Two street lamps and a metal railing line the foreground walkway, while a dense mat of dark floating debris or algae hugs the near shoreline, spreading out in an irregular band before giving way to open water. In the far distance, faint vertical reflections suggest the pillars of a bridge or elevated structure, with a small red-and-dark boat or buoy barely visible near the horizon. The murky water and drifting clutter near the shore point to poor water quality or accumulated pollution along this stretch of the river.

First Memories

Walking across the road, opposite the greenbelt there is a small area paved with stone bricks, right at the corner of the street and the square; from a distance it looks like a decent resting spot, but even from afar you can see that the roof has been torn down at some unknown time. Getting closer, it looks even more off—it’s long since not the same. I used to come here as a child, but now the shed’s roof has been removed, leaving only a few concrete columns standing, the walls cracked, and beside the stone slab on the ground there’s a bit of tree, but the low area is already surrounded by a ring of fallen leaves, no one sweeps or comes. There is still a place to sit, but the stone slab is covered with a layer of dust, which makes you not want to touch it. I just casually found something to cushion, picked the cleanest‑looking slab to sit on, opened my computer and still wanted to write; perhaps this is also a benefit of the AI era—when Vibe coding you don’t really need to sit down and write properly, voice input methods like Typeless, Wispr Flow are enough, there’s an Agent in the CLI that writes for you, I’ve become so lazy I don’t want to type a single character, I’ve already abandoned the conservative baseline, just “bypass permissions”, and now writing code I’m a bit half‑hearted.

Typeless , www.typeless.com, opens in new tab
 A screenshot of a marketing landing page for a product called Typeless, with a bird-like logo and top navigation links for Manifesto, Pricing, and About, plus a black "Download for macOS" button in the corner. The large centered headline reads "Speak, don't type" in bold black-and-gray text, followed by a paragraph explaining that speaking naturally lets Typeless "turn your words into polished messages, emails, and documents" that read as if carefully typed, in real time, and "4x faster than typing." Below the text sits a second, pill-shaped black "Download for macOS" call-to-action button, centered on an otherwise plain white background. The page is evidence of a dictation-to-text macOS app being promoted with a speed and polish claim over traditional typing.

Going off on a tangent, but it still doesn’t work. The MBA’s LCD screen finally made me feel its hard flaw for the first time. At this point I completely give up on coding outdoors. Maybe next year I’ll give up the lightweight form factor, and if my next machine is still a laptop it will probably be an MBP. I was actually planning to go back and code, getting a bit of fresh air is enough, so I walked all the way out and decided to take the other side of the river road to walk back. But as I kept walking, I started not wanting to return. There’s no particular destination; it’s just something I haven’t experienced in a long time—being outdoors still holds a little attraction for me, a feeling I can’t quite put into words. Yet when I really try to feel it, everything around seems disconnected from my memories, nothing matches, and it’s already out of sync with my vague recollections.

Forest Path

Walking back along the road beside the river, I turned into a narrow lane that runs close to the residential buildings. Though it's called a forest path, it hardly qualifies as one; the trees are scattered sparsely, and a wall of the building stands right beside it. The lane is paved with asphalt; at a fork there is a short wooden boardwalk with a pavilion stitched together. The asphalt section has already cracked, and grass has sprouted in the fissures; twigs and fallen leaves litter the surface. On the same stretch you can see two different colors. Half of it has clearly been refurbished, but that “new” look seems to be at least three to five years old, and at the joints, a few blades of grass still stubbornly push up—maybe not even “grass” anymore, just a few rows of weeds.

A photograph taken along a paved footpath cutting through a park or residential courtyard, with weeds and grass sprouting through cracks in the worn concrete. Thick, somewhat overgrown shrubs and bamboo-like hedges line both sides, flanked by trees with white-painted trunks on the right and a leafless tree and a rusted, roofless metal pergola structure in the middle distance. Beyond a low fence and railing on the left stands a tan multi-story building, its windows partly obscured by bare branches, while soft, hazy daylight suggests an overcast morning or late afternoon. The neglected pavement and untrimmed vegetation suggest a lightly maintained green space within an older apartment complex or institutional compound.

I stopped in front of the wooden pavilion’s entrance. The pavilion’s floor is laid with wood, and a few boards are already missing; stepping on the planks makes them flex and emit an unsettling creak, and the nails have probably broken long ago. The top of the wooden walkway is transparent, perhaps glass or acrylic, but more than half of it is already coated with accumulated material, making it barely translucent. The area around it was originally a lawn, or rather about a meter of shrubbery, but now it has grown to almost two meters high, and standing inside truly creates the illusion of being in a jungle—if the view still allows a glimpse of the buildings. The vegetation near the side close to the main road still bears traces of having once been trimmed into a square shape, but the edges have become rounded; time has let it gradually return to the natural form a plant should have.

A photograph taken along a weathered wooden boardwalk that runs beneath a series of rusted metal pergola frames, their trellis tops long since stripped of any climbing plants and left bare against the sky. Dense bamboo and overgrown shrubs crowd both sides of the path, their leaves catching daylight while the wood planks below show gaps, warping, and patches of moss or sprouting weeds pushing up between the boards. In the distance the walkway continues past bare-branched winter trees toward what looks like a pond or open clearing, with a cluster of residential high-rises visible above the greenery on the upper left. The overall impression is of an abandoned or neglected park walkway, reclaimed by vegetation after a period of disuse.

I crouched down and brushed the clump of grass that had grown in the gap of the missing board. It looked like ordinary grass, but it felt dry to the touch, and the soil seemed poor, yet it still managed to sprout from the board’s crack. Usually, hardly anyone comes here… In fact, when walking through these places, my mind has already emptied long ago, with no concrete thoughts—just a sense that a very long time has passed, and the things and details that I normally can’t recall seem to surface automatically when I reach that spot, becoming strikingly clear. Then you can’t help but feel that this place has changed, and that place too. The place in memory no longer exists; time has taken it all away.

A close-up photograph of a weathered wooden boardwalk or dock, shot from a low angle looking down the length of the planks as they recede into the distance. The gray, sun-bleached boards show heavy wear -- splintered edges, protruding rusty nail heads, and several boards cracked or broken through, with tufts of green grass and dead leaves pushing up through the gaps on the left side. The overall condition points to long-term outdoor exposure and neglect, suggesting the structure is due for repair or replacement.

Inside the City

Coming out of the narrow path, I had already left the area of Jiangbian Street and continued forward along a construction site. I've grown tired of the city's buildings long ago, especially the dense residential blocks of second- and third-tier cities, which lack the feel of skyscrapers and have no aesthetic appeal. So I deliberately avoid photographing them; I want to capture some sky, but I found that to be harder than imagined. Standing on the sidewalk, holding my phone high to avoid the street and streetlights, the frame still catches bits of tree shadows and the opposite residential buildings. They are built so densely that it's hard to find a clean patch of sky in this city. Today's weather is actually quite pleasant. There's sunshine, but not strong—more like partly cloudy. Looking up, the clouds are not thick, scattered sparsely, giving a misty feeling while leaving large clear expanses. The clouds are beautiful—the kind you wouldn't notice indoors, yet not the stylized skies of anime; that sort of thing probably doesn't exist in real-life Japan either.

A photograph taken looking straight up into the sky, dominated by scattered wisps and clusters of white cumulus fragments against a hazy blue-gray backdrop. The clouds cluster more densely toward the upper left, thinning to open sky in the center and right, while the silhouetted, leafy branches of a tree cut into the frame along the right edge, their dark foliage backlit by the overcast light. The soft, diffuse illumination suggests a bright but sun-obscured day, with the upward angle and tree branch giving the shot the feel of a casual, ground-level nature snapshot rather than a staged composition.

Going further ahead, we stepped into a construction site. Though it’s called a site, there are actually no workers there. This area is starkly polarized: half of the buildings are already complete, even beginning to attract tenants, while the other half is just a skeletal frame, its fence half taken down, the remaining part still fenced off, and it looks like no one intends to resume work. In recent years, China’s real estate market has been weak, with house prices continually falling; by the time this development would have been finished, prices had already dropped faster than the construction progress. The developers either fled or simply stalled. Ironically, because of this, the unfinished section is blocked by the fence, so few people normally venture in, leaving a large swath of grass. It was the first time today I’d seen such an extensive grassy area since I left home. From a distance it gave me a slight feeling of optimism, as if it were the scene that should belong in my memory, but up close it felt off. The grass was no longer green, mixed with many withered yellow leaves, and I couldn’t tell where the wind had come from, since there were no trees nearby. The grass itself grew crookedly, feeling hard and dry to the touch; yet eventually I still lay down.

A photograph, taken outdoors looking straight down at a patch of lawn where green grass blades push up through a scattering of dry, brittle brown and beige leaves and thatch. A couple of curled reddish-brown leaves sit near the center of the frame, flanked by two thin pale twigs bending upward through the vegetation, with a bit of white plastic debris visible at the lower left edge. The lighting is soft and even, consistent with an overcast day or diffuse daylight, and the image reads as an unremarkable close-up snapshot of ground cover rather than a staged or documentary shot of anything in particular.

The moment I lay down, I knew it wouldn't work. The ground was as hard as cement, only a layer of grass on the surface, with no cushioning at all. When you normally lie on grass you don't want it too wet, but it shouldn't be this dry and hard either. The soil has become completely compacted; from a few meters away it looks no different from a normal lawn, but your body won't be fooled. Not even mosquitoes are present maybe even insects don't want to come to a place like this. Lying there with eyes closed, you don't hear any natural sounds. It's all the city's noise: the roar of gasoline engines—though electric cars have increased in recent years, they’re still unavoidable on the roads; the distant footsteps of pedestrians; and in this small city the cars seem to ignore the rules, occasionally blaring a horn, abrupt and piercing.

City Noise

I opened my eyes, and the noise was still noise. I held the laptop while lying down for a while, grew tired, and casually set it aside. The water was almost finished; I poured out the last bit and tossed it into the trash. Along the way my phone received many messages, but I barely looked at them. After taking a photo I shoved it back into my pocket. Now I feel it’s time to take a look, but the 17P I switched to a few months ago already uses eSIM, and I recently also changed to CMHK and 3HK cards. Roaming to the mainland only gives LTE, not even a hint of 5G, and Apple’s signal is strangely poor.

This is a screenshot of an iPhone Settings screen showing the SIMs section, with two eSIM entries both toggled on: "Travel - CMHK" labeled T1, and "Travel - Hutchison HK" labeled T2, the latter displaying a partially blurred Hong Kong phone number starting with +852 51 and ending in 77. A blue "Add eSIM" link sits below the two entries, indicating the phone is dual-SIM with two Hong Kong carrier eSIMs active, likely set up for travel.

Even though I'm clearly in the city center, the signal is only two bars; Twitter won't load, the music stutters, and nothing loads, so I simply took out the AirPods, put them back in their case, and stopped listening. I can see messages in the notification center, but tapping them loads nothing, leaving the phone useless to play with. Today, when I went out, the laptop screen wasn't bright enough—though it had power, I couldn't write code; the phone had signal but couldn't pull up any content, as if there was a brief disconnect in the internet age. Outdoor electronic devices disappoint one after another. So let's just go back.

A photograph taken indoors, likely in a parking garage or utility corridor, showing a rough concrete wall with a wall-mounted fire hydrant cabinet on the left, labeled "消火栓 / FIRE HYDRANT" in red text on white, alongside exposed pipes and a small wall-mounted exhaust vent above it. Painted in dripping red characters across the lower band of the wall is the warning "消防通道严禁停车" (fire lane, parking strictly prohibited), the paint runs suggesting it was applied by hand with a brush or roller rather than printed. The bare concrete floor, unfinished walls, and utility fittings indicate this is a service or basement area where the sign serves as evidence of an active effort to keep the fire access route clear of parked vehicles.

When I went back, I took a completely different route, entering through the back gate of the community and passing through the underground garage. As a child I often played in the garage, and although I moved home once later, I somehow moved back again. The garage is the only place in my childhood memories that I rarely visited; I can’t tell if its appearance has changed, but I remember its smell. When I was young, the garage had a very fresh scent, a bit like mint—intense but without fragrance, only the character “clear” could describe it, with a hint of the coolness typical of a basement. I actually liked that smell quite a bit. But now, when I go in, that fresh scent is gone. Only a cold, damp humidity clings to the air. When a car passes by, it brings a little wind, probably from the entrance, but that wind feels off, everything feels off, I can’t even picture it now, yet it’s definitely a difference you can feel when you’re there.

One hour

Take the elevator up, open the door and return home. The curtains are drawn already during the day because I’ve long gotten used to living in a place that’s in a different time zone, the light inside isn’t sunlight; it’s the bright white glow from fluorescent tubes—uniform, steady, without warmth. Going out takes less than an hour. But while walking outside, it feels like ages have passed, like a long “dream” where everything changed yet nothing can be explained. Then I wake up. After stepping out of the underground garage elevator, I’m back at this desk, in front of this screen. The temperature of sunlight can indeed feel oppressive, but when it’s absent I miss its feeling. Even though the indoor temperature and humidity are just right, sitting for a long time creates an indescribable fatigue.

Everything feels unreal, in a daze, then I’m back again, and it seems I had already been unable to return long ago.