llms.txt
# Ian Hsiao
> Ian Hsiao studied physics at Peking University and builds products with AI, most recently as co-founder and CTO of Posting Machine.
Posting Machine is an AI-native content engine for B2B SaaS companies. Before that: a software engineering internship at Heptabase (YC W22), and Paper Visualizer, launched at Peking University (class of 2025) by emailing 10,000 schoolmates. The blog is written in English and Traditional Chinese.
Contact: [X](https://x.com/ian_hsiao_tw), [Email](mailto:ian.xiao0918@gmail.com), [GitHub](https://github.com/madeyexz), [Threads](https://www.threads.com/@_ian_xyz_), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-hsiao/), [Heptabase](https://heptabase.com/@ian_hsiao)
## Pages
- [About](https://ianhsiao.me/): Ian Hsiao studied physics at Peking University and builds products with AI, most recently as co-founder and CTO of Posting Machine.
- [Work](https://ianhsiao.me/work): Explore Ian Hsiao’s projects, including Paper Visualizer, Personalized Daily ArXiv, and Chrome extensions, with demos, development notes, and results.
- [Glimpse](https://ianhsiao.me/glimpse): Moments that shaped Ian Hsiao, from 3D animation at 13 and a duct-taped GoPro to a gap year, Heptabase, and graduating from Peking University.
- [Blog](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/): Essays and reading notes by Ian Hsiao on building products, software engineering, research, and learning, in English and Traditional Chinese.
- [RSS feed](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/feed.xml): Full text of every blog post.
## Work: Startups
- [Posting Machine](https://ianhsiao.me/work#posting-machine): Apr – Sep 2026. An AI-native content engine for B2B SaaS companies: Posting Machine turns company context into LinkedIn content for founders and executive teams. Result: $3k MRR and 14+ paying customers by the time I left, including YC companies and top Twitter personalities. Made the top 10% of YC applications.
## Work: Jobs
- [Compound Life](https://ianhsiao.me/work#compound-life): Feb – Aug 2026. Built and shipped a health-data MCP integration (OAuth/PKCE, scoped access, and cross-user access protection) that exposes health memories, nutrition, wearable summaries, biomarkers, and reports to AI clients. Then built an OpenClaw plugin for Compound, which grew into a standalone agent harness with its own health tools, open to anyone on WeChat with their own account.
## Work: Projects
- [Turf War: Taipei](https://ianhsiao.me/work#turf-war): Oct 2026. What if a round-based team shooter like Counter-Strike were set in the streets of Taipei, and you could play it with friends in any browser, even on your phone, with nothing to install? Result: 1,200+ players in matches and 1,800+ visitors from 32 countries in its first four days.
- [Paper Visualizer](https://ianhsiao.me/work#paper-visualizer): Feb – Dec 2025. Reading literature reviews is time-consuming and researchers need faster ways to grasp paper concepts and avoid redundant research - visual flowcharts could accelerate academic comprehension. Result: Users report spending 5x less time to understand a paper. 100+ daily active users within weeks of launch, 180 upvotes on Reddit. 1.4k users.
- [Noey AI](https://ianhsiao.me/work#noey-ai): Jun – Sep 2025. To build a fastest and cheapest way for people to build their personal website. Result: We launched, got 43 users and realized that the giants in the website creating field is already moving into this AI-assisted area quickly, and that focusing on personal website only (where the giants overlooked) isn't interesting enough so we stopped working on this.
- [Insight Generator](https://ianhsiao.me/work#insight-generator): Sep 2024. Something useful that came out from experimenting with extracting insights in a lossless way from long articles. Result: Launched in production in Heptabase in Sept. 2024. The learning and prompts from my experiments were migrated to production in Heptabase. In 2024 this was a novel concept. In 2025, especially after the integration of other more general AI capabilities in Heptabase, this became more or less obsoleted.
## Work: Prototypes
- [Optional Computer](https://ianhsiao.me/work#optional-computer): Sep 2026. What if your agents had their own cloud computer that never sleeps, and you could take over the browser whenever you want?
- [Afterword](https://ianhsiao.me/work#afterword): Sep 2026. What if I could talk to my audiobooks after they read to me, and internalize the content through discussion?
- [Rippling Computer](https://ianhsiao.me/work#rippling-computer): Sep 2026. What if tools kept expanding what one person can do? A direction I'm exploring.
- [Resume MCP](https://ianhsiao.me/work#resume-mcp): Apr 2026. What if you could update your résumé just by talking to ChatGPT, and get a fully formatted PDF back?
- [San Francisco Trip Planner](https://ianhsiao.me/work#sf-trip-planner): Feb 2026. What if you could see all the curated places, event locations, and places to watch out for in one place, and plan your trip there? Designed for event attendees and people who value safety as a first-time visitor. Related thought: Agents as the new backend
- [Nag Alarm AI](https://ianhsiao.me/work#nag-alarm-ai): Jan 2026. What if your alarm can talk to you?
- [Clarity](https://ianhsiao.me/work#clarity): Nov – Dec 2025. Explore tools for thought built around the belief that thoughts are non-linear, interwoven, and best navigated with extensive keyboard shortcuts support.
- [Clarity Reads](https://ianhsiao.me/work#clarity-reads): Nov – Dec 2025. Help myself read history books and other long, dense texts more easily
- [Draw to Create AI](https://ianhsiao.me/work#draw-to-create-ai): Sep – Nov 2025. Built this for my younger self because I love to imagine stickmans fighting, and I'd absolutely love this if i'm a kid again.
- [AI Learning Assistant](https://ianhsiao.me/work#ai-learning-assistant): Mar 2025. Cross-domain learners need a way to understand unfamiliar concepts quickly. Learning by analogy is a powerful way to understand new concepts.
- [Personalized Daily ArXiv](https://ianhsiao.me/work#personalized-daily-arxiv): Feb 2025. Researchers spend 30-60 minutes every 2 days manually screening 100+ new papers - AI could transparently filter and recommend based on personal research interests with clear reasoning.
- [Select to Explain](https://ianhsiao.me/work#select-to-explain): Feb 2025. Cross-domain researchers struggle with technical jargon when reading papers outside their expertise - contextual explanations could bridge knowledge gaps without switching to Google or ChatGPT.
- [Innline Annotation](https://ianhsiao.me/work#inline-annotation): Jan 2025. Cross-domain learners constantly encounter unfamiliar terms requiring manual lookup - AI could automatically annotate based on user background to streamline learning.
- [Reconstruct](https://ianhsiao.me/work#reconstruct): Jan 2025. Extracting useful insights from different long-form content, including cutting, categorizing, formatting, and organizing notes takes hours - a visual, smart whiteboard could help users focus on understanding and asking questions rather than manual knowledge organization.
- [Social Vegan](https://ianhsiao.me/work#social-vegan): Nov – Dec 2023. Learning more about vector embeddings; participate in a hackathon
- [Markdown File Query System](https://ianhsiao.me/work#markdown-file-query): Apr – May 2023. Notion AI was launched, but I don't want to pay $10 a month so I built my own version.
## Work: Others
- [High School Physics Teacher](https://ianhsiao.me/work#high-school-physics-teacher): Aug 2022. Share effective study methodologies and advanced physics concepts with high school students -- As a substitue physics teacher (I was in my second year of college)
## Blog: AI & Software
- [Future of Software in Age of Agents](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/future-of-software-in-age-of-agents): 2026-10-06. agents are for work; software is for the rest of being human.
- [Some AI future hot takes](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/some-ai-future-hot-takes): 2026-09-30. Scoring the AI predictions I made this year, and what I think happens next.
- [AmpCode is cool](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/ampcode-is-cool): 2026-07-31. There are infinite work to be done and undone
- [Enabling Slack MCP in Codex and Claude Code (workaround)](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/enabling-slack-mcp-in-codex-and-claude-code-workaround): 2026-04-30. Codex CLI and Claude Code both refuse to log into Slack's hosted MCP server because they only know how to do Dynamic Client Registration, and Slack doesn't support it. Here's the bearer-token workaround that actually works today, plus the GitHub issues to watch.
- [Closing the Agentic Coding Loop with Just Enough Human Feedback](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/closing-the-agentic-coding-loop): 2026-01-26. I think I figured out how to steer the agents minimally but still have the desired result--theoretically; and I think it's very different from what people are talking about today, so it's worth noting.
- [Software as toys](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/software-as-toys): 2026-01-16. Software as toys? Human as boot loaders? Will the next generation of intelligence kill us? How is coding changing again? Some thoughts.
- [Video Editing/Planning in 2023 (AI assisted)](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/video-editing-planning-ai-assisted): 2023-12-10. How I made a trailer video without any prior experience, using ChatGPT to help with planning and scriptwriting.
- [A Dating Service with Text-embedding Model?](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/dating-service-text-embedding): 2023-12-06. Social Vegan - a dating app proof of concept using OpenAI's text-embedding model and Pinecone vector database to match people based on their relationship values.
- [Markdown File Query](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/markdown-file-query): 2023-10-24. Query any markdown file (Notion/Obsidian) using vector embedding, Pinecone vector database and GPT - a semantic QA system for your personal knowledge base.
## Blog: Startups
- [亞洲問題](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/an-asian-problem): 2026-06-24. 大不了多「失敗」幾次就有更多 track record 了 XD
- [Learnings from an Ex-Amazon Engineer](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/learnings-from-an-ex-amazon-engineer): 2025-08-26. There are often moments when I can’t tell if LLM over-engineered, and that’s when I know I have limited knowledge on the subject. I rely a lot more on seniors and talking to models to learn here.
- [過去兩個月打造產品所學](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/guo-qu-liang-ge-yue-da-zao-chan-pin-suo-xue): 2025-03-01. 相信自己，然後穩步前進
- [在 startup 工作 6 個月](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/zai-startup-gong-zuo-6-ge-yue): 2024-10-23. 作為一個對做酷東西和做產品感興趣的人而言，在一家優秀的新創公司實習是一件很幸運的事。一方面是因為能與很強的人共事，可以學到他們的心法以及做事方法論，另一方面是因為新創公司速度快、人少的特性，讓我有機會接觸到一些我現在能力範圍外的任務 (punch above my weight)。這篇文章主要寫的是這幾個月對專注的新理解，以及在 AI 時代做技術工作的一感想。
- [在 startup 工作 1 個月](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/zai-startup-gong-zuo-ge-yue): 2024-05-08. 最重要的是明確最重要的是什麼
- [敢於嘗試，機會是主動拿到的。](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/gan-yu-chang-shi-ji-hui-shi-zhu-dong-na-dao-de): 2024-04-05.
## Blog: Reflections
- [關於信念](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/conviction): 2026-08-27. 信念來源於經驗，也來自於在不確定中賭一把的勇氣。
- [San Francisco](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/san-francisco): 2026-03-31. What a great city!
- [隨波逐流 Currents](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/currents): 2026-02-06. 你總是擁有選擇的權利
- [人生三問之：我是誰？](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/who-am-i-2025): 2025-12-31. 連點成線，我是一個想要理解世界運作本質、並用這份理解去創造改變的人。
- [Learn >> Build, Source](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/learn--build-source): 2025-09-30.
- [The Three Most Important Things in My Life Right Now: Build, Learn, and Source](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/the-three-most-important-things-in-my-life-right-now-build-learn-and-source): 2025-07-30. I just wanted to say that, as someone who just graduated and doesn’t have a golden handcuff, I am very excited about the future!
- [My Current Mindsets / Value](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/my-current-mindsets-slash-value): 2025-06-06.
- [My understanding of risk and uncertainty before graduating college](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/my-understanding-of-risk-and-uncertainty-before-graduating-college): 2025-06-04. Take the largest bet that you are ok with failing.
- [大學畢業前夕對風險與不確定性的理解](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/da-xue-bi-ye-qian-dui-feng-xian-de-li-jie): 2025-06-04. 選擇那些你能承受失敗的最大賭注。
- [How to choose a college](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/how-to-choose-a-college): 2024-11-01. I wrote this to answer a question I had when I was 17—how to choose a college? But I think if you substitute college with another organization or place that you will stay for a few years, some questio...
- [如何選擇大學](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/ru-he-xuan-ze-da-xue): 2024-11-01. 這篇文章是我為回答 17 歲時自己的疑問所寫，當時我在思考要讀哪一所大學。不過，我認為如果把「大學」換成其他你會待上幾年的組織或地方，其中的一些思考或問題依然適用。
- [與世界碰撞](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/yu-shi-jie-peng-zhuang): 2024-08-07. 每一次出遠門都很值得
- [和自己說說話](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/he-zi-ji-shuo-shuo-hua): 2024-06-11. 你知道嗎？你也可以 prompt engineer 自己哦
- [不鼓勵、不反對](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/bu-gu-li-bu-fan-dui): 2024-04-24. 我成長背景的一隅。
- [休學的一些反思](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/xiu-xue-de-xie-fan-si): 2024-04-19. 這幾個月閱讀了很多人成長、自我實現與反思的文章，也有機會接觸到一些很尊敬且想成為的人。他們給我了帶來很大的啟發，也給了我一些往前的、探索的動力。
- [我從北大休學的原因](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/wo-cong-bei-da-xiu-xue-de-yuan-yin): 2024-03-13.
## Blog: Reading
- [Revisiting Engelbart in 2026](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/revisiting-engelbart-in-2026): 2026-02-12. A framework to understand the far-reaching effects of AI.
- [《The Dream Machine》閱讀小心得](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/the-dream-machine-yue-du-xiao-xin-de): 2025-11-30. 人類打造工具、工具反過來增強人類，這種往復的循環讓人振奮，也讓我深受感動。
- [Notes on “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering”](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/notes-on-the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering): 2025-10-28. Luck favors the prepared mind.
- [The Art of Doing Science and Engineering 閱讀筆記](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering-yue-du-bi-ji): 2025-10-28. Luck favors the prepared mind.
- [Takeaways from How to Do Great Work](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/takeaways-from-how-to-do-great-work): 2024-05-22. Doing great work is a depth-first search whose root node is the desire to. So if you don’t succeed, either try again, or backtrack and then try again. Corollary, never abandon the root node.
- [神经整合 - 如何设计生物神经元网络](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/neural-integration): 2023-03-17. 探讨如何利用生物神经元实现逻辑门运算，包括与门、或门、非门和异或门的设计方法，以及人工神经网络的基本原理。
- [Notes on Attachment](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/notes-on-attachment): 2022-03-28. Comprehensive notes on attachment theory covering attachment styles, the Adult Attachment Interview, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and how attachment affects relationships, work, and life.
## Blog: Random
- [近期隨想](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/recent-random-thoughts): 2026-06-24. “The world is no longer intelligence-constrained; it’s passion-constrained.”
- [How to Pickpocket and How NOT to be Pickpocketed](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/how-to-pickpocket-and-how-not-to-be-pickpocketed): 2024-06-03. Jun 3, 2024
- [Hi, this is my new blog :D](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/hi-this-is-my-new-blog-d): 2024-04-17.
- [Ask Me Anything! (active)](https://blog.ianhsiao.me/ask-me-anything-active): 2024-03-10.
