Zhicheng's Blog
A Chronicles of a 👨💻Programmer (with 📊📈Analytical Mindset Who was Once a 🎨🖌️Designer): Learn to Debug Life
Welcome to my blog!
This blog chronicles my personal exploration into the worlds of coding (with LLMs ofc, what were you expecting?) and life itself.
Here, I share the things I encounter while learning to program.
Think of it as me trying to debug life while getting better at debugging code.
Fueled by my own insatiable curiosity (and AI's endless patience), bolstered by my humble attitude of learning (with millions of searches on Google),
I'm pretty confident this debugging process will be wrapped up by the end of this century.
👨💻 Building:
• AperilexLabs
• Shotwise
• LLM Reader
✉️: zcmmwang@gmail.com
🐦: X
🌟: GitHub
Spent the last couple of nights (~20 hours) turning one of the “life outside building” ideas into an actual app.
It’s called Shotwise: upload a photo, get an AI critique, then generate an improved version.
This one was very different from my other project (Aperilex). Aperilex is a slow, deliberate learning grind; Shotwise is much more of a controlled dopamine sprint.
It’s been 7 weeks since I started building extensively with Claude Code. Now I have managed to deploy a working version of Aperilex which was a complete rewrite of the previous version which took about 5 months without deployment. Of course, there have been many ups and downs, but overall it’s been a fantastic learning journey. Time to review and reflect on the entire process.
Second week of Aperilex development, focusing on the application layer. Now that this layer is complete, it’s time to review the work done so far and reflect on the process. Fantastic and dream-like experience.
Been into a week of rebuilding Aperilex with Claude Code, focusing on the domain and infrastructure layers to build the solid foundation for the app. The experience has been intense, filled with learning and development challenges. Never thought about this kind of speed before but here we go. Today marks the completion for both phases and I’m excited to see how it all comes together.
Into the 4th day of rebuilding with Claude Code. Started to work on the edgartools and LLM in infrastructure layer overhauling the core of Aperilex. The main thrust was to pivot from generalized analysis to a highly structured, data-driven workflow, which involved a significant refactoring of our data ingestion and LLM orchestration layers.
Into the third night of coding with Claude Code, I focused on implementing the domain layer of Aperilex as outlined on the project PHASE.md, refining the core logic and data structures that will drive our SEC Filing Analysis Engine. This post details the process and decisions made during this phase.
As in the night 2 coding with Claude Code, I focused on establishing and refining the initial project setup for Aperilex while, of course, learning with the good practices provided by Claude (Opus4 and Sonnet4).
I knew this would come at some point as I was developing the SEC Analysis Project. Last weekend I started to refactor the codebase for better code quality check and planned the roadmap for better architecture and security. Instead of applying band-aid fixes, I decided today on a complete rewrite—but this time, of course, not alone.
Technical debt often manifests as rigidity. Our application’s journal feature was a prime example, built on a hardcoded assumption that all activities were either “Work” or “Life”. This was simple to implement initially but impossible to scale. Every user’s life is more nuanced than that binary choice.
This post outlines a foundational refactor to move from this static system to a dynamic, user-driven one.
Raw data is valuable, but insights are transformative. Synapse has been good enough at capturing daily activities, but the next logical step has always been to synthesize that data into high-level understanding. Today’s task is to implement the new feature on the roadmap: AI-Powered Weekly Reports.
This feature moves beyond simple data retrieval and uses LLM to analyze a week’s worth of activities, generating a concise, structured summary of your time allocation, key accomplishments, and emerging trends.