HaoQian.co

My work was scattered — essays on LinkedIn, books on Amazon, apps on their own domains, drawings in folders, ideas in chat logs. Platforms are rented rooms; they reorganise, decay, or disappear. A life's work needs a building it owns.

The strategy is written down and lives in this repo: this is not a portfolio, a blog, or a resume — it is a library built to be tended for decades. Success is measured in ten, twenty, thirty years: a complete record of the thinking, the work preserved, and children who can walk the shelves.

I designed the foundations myself in Claude Design — 'a library, not a website': Newsreader for reading, warm paper neutrals, one blue for links and one green reserved for connections between works, a 640-pixel reading measure, motion at a single 250ms curve.

Everything has a home and every home has a shape: books carry their editions and history, essays carry their provenance, the garden carries numbered ideas that are never finished.

Next.js 16 with Tailwind 4 on AWS Amplify. All content is typed data files and plain text in the repo — no CMS, no database. The full text of every Working Theory essay was recovered from LinkedIn and lives in version control; adding a new one is a two-file change.

The repo is agent-operable by design: strategy, content inventory and working conventions are documented in-repo, so any future session — human or AI — can pick up the library and keep building without re-learning it.

Own the source of truth and let platforms be distribution. Every essay brought home, every book page built from real production files, made the site more valuable than the sum of the links it replaced.

The owner should make the taste decisions and the agent should make them real. The design system took one afternoon once it was mine; implementing it took an agent one more.

The connections panel — the green links that let a reader walk from an idea to the essay it seeded to the book it became. Search, once the shelves are fuller. A dark pass, already specced.