The Beginning
Over the years of learning and working, I’ve written many notes across many tools and platforms — physical diaries, WeChat favorites, Youdao Cloud Notes, Notion, OneNote, Obsidian Vaults, and more. These fragments were scattered everywhere. Managing them was a constant headache.
I realized the problem wasn’t the note-taking tools. I lacked a knowledge center that I truly owned — one that doesn’t depend on any platform, can’t be deleted, and won’t be “optimized” away.
Why Go Public
People ask: why not just keep a local Obsidian Vault? Why publish to a website?
Two reasons.
First, public writing forces quality. When you know someone might read your work, you naturally sharpen your arguments and verify your evidence more carefully. This isn’t performance — it’s self-discipline.
Second, writing is a tool for thinking. As Paul Graham said, you don’t write to express what you already think. You write to discover what you actually think. Countless times I thought I understood a concept, until I sat down to write about it and realized everything was fuzzy. The process of writing clearly is the process of understanding deeply.
Why Astro + Markdown
I spent an entire week on the tech stack decision.
I evaluated WordPress — too heavy, the database is a burden. Hugo — builds fast but the template language is painful. Next.js — overkill for a content site, I don’t need the entire React ecosystem. Eventually I chose Astro: zero JS by default, native Markdown support, and the build output is pure static HTML files.
Markdown was the most critical choice. It’s not the prettiest format, but it’s the most durable. Twenty years from now you can still open a .md file. Twenty years from now Notion might not exist.
Where the Name Comes From
“Dao Yi” comes from the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 42: “The Dao gives birth to One, One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, Three gives birth to all things.”
“One” is the origin of all things — the first principle abstracted from chaos. This concept echoes how AI extracts patterns from complex data. AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence.
A single name spanning two millennia, connecting ancient Chinese philosophy with 21st-century artificial intelligence.
What I’ve Gained
This site officially launched today — July 22, 2026 — a day worth celebrating. My biggest gain hasn’t been skill improvement, but the emergence of a knowledge network.
When you write article after article — related but never repetitive — you begin to discover connections you never noticed before: the essence of Prompt Engineering relates to API cost control; Attention’s computational bottleneck dictates the direction of inference optimization; Obsidian’s bidirectional link design and knowledge graph visualization share the same network thinking. These connections weren’t planned before writing — they emerged naturally during the process.
This made me truly understand the core insight from Reading Notes: Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: the most valuable discoveries come from the exploration process itself, not from preset goals.
For how I organize these notes, I drew from the methodology in AI Knowledge Management with Obsidian.
From the Dao as origin, from the One as beginning; understanding all things with intelligence, generating the future with technology.