I'm a real homebody, and at some point — I can't say when — "going out" turned into a word I barely recognize. Whole months go by where I only leave the house when I have to, and even then my life is , usually with a ride in between. When I really think about it, it's been a very long time since I last genuinely left the indoors. After living through the bubble and the anxiety of the AI era, I picked up a bad habit — writing code in the small hours, until I seem to be in a different "time zone" from the world I live in. This morning was no different: I dragged myself out of bed past noon, ate only twice all day, and went straight from waking to sitting down in the study, opening the laptop, and starting to write. Writing code is a genuinely fun thing to do, but writing code in the AI era isn't. I stared at the screen into the afternoon and produced nothing. No design ideas. Everything felt imperfect.

Outside?

At that moment, a thought I hadn’t had in a long time suddenly surfaced: “outside.” Not any particular place, just a hazy feeling, as though my memory once held such things as sunlight, wind, and grass, though I could no longer quite put it into words. The fact that I couldn’t put it into words bothered me a little. The weather happened to be nice today, and Claude had hit the session limit, so I closed my laptop, put on my headphones, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed out. Yes, I went out with my MacBook Air. I suppose the idea was to keep writing somewhere else and maybe find a little inspiration too?

I walked out through the residential complex’s gate and followed the street to the intersection with the main road, where a sudden gust rushed between two tall buildings. I froze for a moment—“Wind”!? How long had it been since I’d felt anything like it? Not the breeze from an air conditioner or an electric fan, but wind that was unpredictable, warm, and slightly gentle, blowing in from somewhere far away; wind with a sound, mingling with the clamor of the city streets. I was listening to music through my AirPods, but the sensation of being outdoors instinctively made me turn off noise cancellation. So I walked toward the river along the main road, a bottle of water in my left hand and my laptop tucked under my right arm. This time, I didn’t stare at my phone screen as I walked. I’m not sure why; I just wanted to reach the river first and decide what to do from there.

Unseen

After walking a hundred or two hundred meters, I reached the river. The stone railing beside the sidewalk was just wide enough to hold a laptop. I hadn’t actually planned to code there—I was finally by the river after not going out for ages, so I took a photo with my phone first. Once I’d taken it, I realized being outdoors felt pretty good, so I casually pulled out my MacBook and propped it on the railing. When I unlocked the screen, it was filled with editors and terminals. For some reason, I suddenly wanted to post a tweet like those where someone opens a MacBook on a snowy mountain or while fishing, with the screen full of IDEs and terminals and the caption “what can stop you coding like this,” but I quickly gave up because the 2025 MBA’s LCD screen just doesn’t get bright enough...

A photograph of an open black laptop balanced on a granite railing post above a wide, silt-brown river, its screen dark and mirroring only the rippled water in front of it. The far bank is a low green treeline under a flat white haze, with a cluster of pale apartment towers and a construction crane at the left, more blocks and a long road bridge at the right; a small red channel buoy sits alone in the water. Closer in, a metal handrail and a low lamp trace the embankment walkway to the right, where mudflats streaked with algae are exposed at the edge. The light is diffuse and shadowless, midday under overcast or smog, and the scene reads as someone pausing riverside with their work machine rather than actually using it.

The moment I opened the screen I knew it was over. 's brightness is simply not enough outdoors. I tried a few angles — backlit, front-lit, even lining myself up with the sun — and no matter what I did I couldn't read a thing. Pretty pathetic, honestly. Indoors I feel like a programmer; outdoors I discover I can't even get my screen to light up. Fine, the code can go unwritten. But I still wasn't ready to give up, so I closed the laptop and decided to try my luck in the shade of the trees across the road. Before leaving the railing, I looked out at the river one more time. From a distance it was fine, really — under that cloudy-with-sun light the water still looked the way it does in my memory. But tilt your head down a little, drop your gaze toward the bank, and you find a layer of stuff floating on the surface: algae, leaves, scattered bits of debris. Not much, but the river is no longer clear. The water is stiller than I remember, yet clearly nobody has tended the bank in a long time. "Back during the pandemic years I actually came out to look, and it had already been like this since then." Still, walking past it always stirs something in me.

A photograph taken from a riverside boardwalk, looking across a wide expanse of flat grey-brown water toward a distant city skyline. The light is diffuse and hazy — an overcast or smoggy day with no visible sun — so the cluster of high-rises and two slim towers on the far bank read as pale silhouettes above a low band of bare trees, their reflections smeared faintly in the water. In the foreground, below a metal cable railing and two grey lamp posts, a large raft of dark floating debris and vegetation has collected against the near shore, with a few pale scraps of litter caught in it, while a single small red boat sits alone mid-river. It appears to be evidence of surface pollution or debris accumulation along an urban river, with the skyline placing it in a large, actively developing city.

Early Memories

I crossed the road. In the greenery on the other side there was a small patch paved with stone bricks, right at the corner where the street meets the square. From a distance it looked like a decent place to rest, except that even from far off I could see the roof was gone, taken down at some point, and up close it was worse -- it had stopped being that place a long time ago. I came here as a kid, but now the shelter's roof has been torn off, only a few concrete pillars still standing, the walls cracked open. There are a few trees beside the flagstones on the ground, but a ring of fallen leaves had long since gathered underneath, nobody sweeping, nobody coming. There were still places to sit, just with a film of dust over the stone that made you not want to touch it. I found something to put down anyway, picked the cleanest-looking slab, sat down, and opened the laptop again -- I still wanted to write. Maybe that is one of the good things about the AI era: when you are vibe coding you do not really need to sit down properly and write any more, a voice input method like Typeless or Wispr Flow will do, with an Agent in a CLI writing it for you and that is that. I have got lazy enough that I do not want to type a single character, and I lost the conservative's bottom line a long time ago -- «bypass permissions» and be done with it. Even writing code has turned into .

Typeless , www.typeless.com, opens in new tab
 A screenshot of the landing page for a macOS app called Typeless, rendered on a plain white background with a wordmark and small dark glyph at top left, a centred nav of Manifesto, Pricing and About, and a black pill button reading "Download for macOS" in the top right. The hero headline sits huge and centred — "Speak," in near-black followed by "don't type" in mid grey — above a two-line subhead that mixes grey and black weight for emphasis: "Speak naturally, and Typeless will turn your words into polished messages, emails, and documents that read like you carefully typed them - in real time. 4x faster than typing." A second, larger copy of the same black "Download for macOS" button sits below the copy, and the lower half of the frame is empty white. This looks like a captured reference of a marketing hero section — a dictation/speech-to-text product pitching itself on speed and output polish — likely saved as a design or copywriting example.

Anyway, I’m getting off track—but it still wasn’t working. For the first time, the MBA’s LCD screen finally revealed a fatal flaw to me, and at that point I gave up completely on writing code outdoors. Maybe next year I’ll stop prioritizing light weight and slimness; maybe, if my next computer is still a laptop, it’ll be an MBP. By then I’d actually decided to head back and write—coming out for the occasional breath of fresh air would be enough. But since I’d already walked this far, I might as well cross to the other side of the riverside road and walk back that way. Yet as I kept walking, I found myself not really wanting to go back. It wasn’t that I had a destination; it was just something I hadn’t felt in a long time, as if the outdoors itself could still hold some attraction for me, though I couldn’t quite explain what kind. But when I genuinely tried to take it in, everything around me seemed disconnected from my memories. Nothing felt right anymore; it had long since ceased to match those hazy recollections...

Woodland Path

I crossed to the other side of the riverside road and walked back, turning into a small path that ran close to the residential blocks. Calling it a woodland path is a stretch: the trees are planted thin and sparse, and just past the wall beside it are the buildings. The path is asphalt, with a short stretch of wooden boardwalk and a pavilion pieced together at the fork. The asphalt part has already cracked, grass growing out of the seams, small twigs and fallen leaves scattered over the surface. You can see two different colors on the same stretch of road — half of it was clearly resurfaced, though even that "new" looks at least three or five years old, and a few of grass have stubbornly pushed up through the joint anyway? Not really , though — more like a few rows of weeds.

A photograph taken at eye level along a wide concrete footpath that runs away from the camera through a landscaped strip beside a residential development, the pavement dusty and streaked with fallen twigs and dry leaves, weeds pushing up through every seam and along the kerb. On the left the path is bordered by overgrown shrubs and a hedge line backed by a metal fence, behind which two pale high-rise apartment towers with dark glazed window bands rise into a bright overcast sky; on the right, whitewashed-trunked young trees stand in mown grass, with a low pergola or shelter frame visible where the path bends out of sight in the middle distance. The light is flat and hazy, low and winter-ish, throwing long soft shadows across the paving and leaving the towers slightly washed out. It reads as an unremarkable walk-through record of a newly built but already under-maintained neighbourhood green belt.

I stepped onto the wooden boardwalk and stopped in front of the pavilion. Its floor was made of wooden planks, several of which were already missing; the boards tilted upward when stepped on, making the kind of sound that did little to inspire confidence—the nails had probably snapped off inside long ago. The roof over the boardwalk was transparent, perhaps glass, perhaps acrylic? But more than half of it had long since become covered in buildup, so it no longer let much light through. The surroundings had originally been lawn, or rather shrubs about a meter high, but they had now grown to nearly two meters; standing among them really did create the illusion of being in a jungle—if the buildings had not still been visible out of the corner of one’s eye. On the side near the main road, traces remained of the vegetation having once been trimmed into a square, but its edges had grown rounded; time was slowly returning it to the shape a plant was naturally meant to take.

A photograph, stored rotated ninety degrees, of a weathered wooden boardwalk running away from the camera beneath a rusted steel pergola whose bare beams and cable rails are half-swallowed by overhanging bamboo and shrubs. Low sun rakes across the greyed planks from one side, throwing long bars of shadow and leaving dry leaf litter and stray grass collected in the gaps; the growth is dense and unclipped, closing over the walkway further along. Through a break in the frame at the far end, the glass-and-concrete facade of a high-rise office block rises against a pale, hazy sky, placing this overgrown elevated walk squarely inside a city rather than a park.

I crouched down and ran my hand over the clump of grass growing where a plank was missing. It looked no different from ordinary grass, but it felt dry, and the soil did not seem very good either—yet it had still managed to grow through the gaps between the planks. Probably no one usually comes here... In fact, when walking through places like these, my mind had long since gone blank. I had no particular thoughts; it just felt as though, after a very, very long time, the things and details I could never normally recall—the hazy memories—would surface on their own as soon as I reached that place, suddenly becoming incredibly vivid. And then I would find myself thinking: this has changed, and that has changed too. The place I remembered had long since ceased to exist. Time had taken it all away.

A photograph looking down at close range onto a weathered outdoor boardwalk, the grey sun-bleached planks running diagonally from lower left to upper right and filling the entire frame under flat, shadowless overcast light. Many boards have split, cupped or snapped clean through, leaving dark gaps and jagged voids where the ends have rotted away; nail heads sit proud of the timber and one plank has lifted out of line entirely. Through a wide break across the upper left, thin green grass, dead leaves and twigs push up from the bare soil beneath, and a strip of paving is just visible at the very top edge. The image reads as evidence of a neglected, unsafe walkway — the rot, missing boards and vegetation growing through suggest it has been out of maintenance for several seasons.

In the City

Coming out of the path, I had already left the riverside streets behind and continued along a stretch of construction site. I had long since grown tired of looking at city buildings, especially the dense clusters of apartment blocks in second- and third-tier cities like this one: packed tightly together, yet without the grandeur of skyscrapers and utterly devoid of beauty. So I deliberately avoided photographing them. I wanted to photograph the sky instead, but found it harder than I had imagined. Standing on the sidewalk, I held my phone up high, keeping the street and the streetlights out of frame, yet shadows of trees and a sliver of the apartment building opposite still crept into the shot. Everything was built too densely; it was difficult to find a single patch of unobstructed sky in this city. The weather was actually very pleasant today. It was sunny, but not intensely so—more like partly cloudy. Looking up, the clouds were sparse, scattered loosely across the sky, creating a hazy, mist-wreathed feeling while leaving vast expanses clear. The clouds were beautiful. It was the kind of beauty you would never notice when you were usually “indoors,” though it was not the kind of sky I like in Japanese anime either. “That sort of thing probably doesn’t even exist in real-life Japan.”

A photograph looking straight up into a pale blue-grey daytime sky scattered with small, soft-edged tufts of white cloud — an altocumulus-like field that thickens toward the upper left of the frame and thins into clear sky at the lower right. Along the right edge, the tip of a leafy branch reaches in from off-frame, its slender twigs and pointed compound leaves rendered almost black against the bright sky, though a few leaves catch enough light to show green. The light is diffuse and slightly hazy, with the sky's brightness increasing toward the clouded corner, suggesting the sun sits just outside the frame on that side. It reads as a casual upward-angled snapshot, likely taken from beneath a tree.

A little farther on, I entered a construction site. Or rather, it was supposedly a construction site, but there were no workers left. The area was sharply divided in two: half the buildings were finished and already courting businesses and taking on tenants, while the other half had been reduced to bare frames; some of the fencing had been removed, and what remained still enclosed them, though no one seemed to have any intention of resuming work. China’s property market has been struggling in recent years, with home prices falling steadily. Presumably, before this development could be completed, prices were already dropping faster than construction was progressing. The developer had either fled or was simply holding out without doing anything. But that was precisely why the unpaved stretch, sealed off by fencing and rarely entered, had preserved a vast patch of grass. It was the first large expanse of grass I had seen since setting out that day. From a distance it lifted my spirits a little—this was how things were supposed to look in my memories—but up close, it was wrong again. The grass was no longer green, but strewn with many withered yellow leaves that had blown in from who knew where, since there were no trees nearby at all. The grass itself grew crookedly and felt stiff and dry; even so, I lay down on it in the end.

A close-up downward photograph of a patch of ground, filling the entire frame with grass — thin green blades tangled together with a heavy mat of pale, dried, straw-coloured stems that dominates the centre and left. Scattered across it are bleached and browned fallen leaves, a few darker damp ones near the lower-left corner where bare soil shows through, and one pair of small rust-orange leaves near the middle that are the only saturated colour in the picture. A slender bare twig, silvery-white and forked, lies diagonally across the right-of-centre, and the light is flat and overcast with no visible shadows. It reads as an informal ground-texture shot, the kind taken to record the state of a lawn or verge in late autumn or early spring, when new growth is coming up through last season's dead thatch.

The moment I lay down, I knew it wasn’t going to work. The ground was as hard as concrete, with nothing but a layer of grass on top and no cushioning at all. When you lie on grass, you normally don’t want it too wet, but it shouldn’t be this dry or this hard either. The soil was completely compacted. From a few meters away, it looked no different from a normal lawn, but your body doesn’t lie. There weren’t even any mosquitoes or bugsperhaps even insects didn’t want to come to a place like this. Lying there with my eyes closed, I couldn’t hear anything natural either. It was all the din of the city: the engines of fuel-burning cars, still inescapable on the roads despite the surge in electric vehicles over the past few years; the footsteps of pedestrians in the distance; and, since cars in small cities like this seem to pay little attention to the rules, the occasional horn, abrupt and piercing.

City Noise

I opened my eyes, and the noise was still noise. After lying there with my laptop for a while, I got tired and casually set it beside me. I was almost out of water too, so I poured away the last bit and tossed the bottle in the trash. My phone had received lots of messages along the way, but I had barely looked at them, slipping it back into my pocket as soon as I finished taking photos. Now felt like the time to check, but the 17P I switched to several months ago already used eSIM, and after recently switching to CMHK and 3HK SIMs, roaming in mainland China only gave me LTE—not even a hint of 5G—and Apple’s reception was astonishingly bad.

A cropped iOS screenshot in dark mode of the "SIMs" section of the cellular settings, showing a rounded dark card with two eSIM entries. The first, tagged "T1", reads "Travel - CMHK" and is set to "On"; the second, tagged "T2", reads "Travel - Hutchison HK", also "On", with a Hong Kong number beneath it starting "+852 51" and ending "77", the middle digits deliberately blurred out. A blue "Add eSIM" link sits at the bottom of the card, and each row has a chevron for further detail. It is evidence of a device carrying two active Hong Kong travel eSIMs at once, screenshotted and redacted before sharing.

Right in the middle of the city, I had only two bars: Twitter wouldn’t load, the music kept cutting out, and nothing would buffer, so I simply took off my Air Pods, put them back in the case, and stopped listening. I could see messages in Notification Center, but tapping them brought up nothing. Now I couldn’t even entertain myself with my phone. I went out today, but my laptop screen was too dim to code despite having power; my phone had a signal but couldn’t load any content. It felt as though I’d briefly dropped offline in the internet age. Outdoors, every electronic device was more useless than the last. Might as well go home.

A photograph of a bare concrete wall in a dim underground parking garage, shot straight on. Across the lower grey band of the wall, six large Chinese characters are hand-painted in red with visible drips: 消防通道 严禁停车 — "fire lane, parking strictly prohibited." At the left edge a wall-mounted fire hydrant cabinet with a cracked glass door is labelled 消火栓 / FIRE HYDRANT, fed by galvanised pipework that runs up to conduit along the ceiling, and a small square exhaust vent sits higher on the pale upper wall. The flat, shadowless light and the empty, stained floor suggest a phone snapshot taken to record that the access route is clear and marked.

On the way back I took a completely different route, cutting in through the back gate of the complex and past the underground garage. I used to play in that garage all the time as a kid; we moved away once, and then somehow moved back. The garage is the one place in my growing-up memories I didn't visit often, so I can't tell whether it looks any different, but I remember its smell. Back then the garage held a kind of fresh air, a little like mint, thick but with no perfume to it, nothing left to describe it but the single word , with a trace of that cool basement damp mixed in. I actually liked that smell quite a lot. But walking in now, that clear air is gone. All that's left is a chilly moisture, sitting stuffy in the air. A car drove past and stirred up a little wind, probably blowing in from the entrance, but even that wind was wrong, everything was wrong, wrong in every direction, and I can no longer picture how it used to be, though it is absolutely the kind of difference you can feel the moment you stand there.

One Hour

I took the elevator upstairs, opened the door, and came home. The curtains had been drawn since daytime because I had long since grown used to living in a different time zone from the place where I lived. The light inside wasn’t sunlight, but the bright white glow of fluorescent tubes—uniform, steady, and without warmth. I had probably been out for less than an hour. Yet while I was outside, it always felt as though a very, very long time had passed, like having a long “dream” in which everything had changed, yet none of it could be put into words. Then I woke up. After stepping out of the elevator from the underground garage, I returned once again to this desk, to this screen. The warmth of sunlight can sometimes feel oppressively hot, but when it’s gone, I miss how it feels. Although the temperature and humidity indoors are just right, sitting here too long gives rise to an inexplicable weariness.

Everything felt unreal. In a daze, I was back there again, yet it also seemed I had long since lost any way of going back.