About

I’m Yaodong Zhao, a software engineer.

I build web applications. But what keeps me interested isn’t the building itself. It’s the questions that surface along the way. Why did the designers make this trade-off? What gets lost when we optimize for convenience? When a constraint feels limiting, is it a flaw, or is it the point?

These days, I’ve been exploring AI coding tools, trying to understand what changes when the tool starts thinking alongside you. It’s a strange shift: watching something else write code while you guide it, wondering where your judgment ends and its suggestions begin.

That’s part of why I write here. AI can summarize solutions, but it can’t capture what it felt like to find them. The dead ends, the debugging at midnight, the trade-offs made under constraints nobody else will see. I want to hold onto those details, even the ordinary ones. They’re what actually happened.

So this space is part technical blog, part thinking-out-loud. Software, design decisions, and sometimes a connection to something further afield. If you want to talk, find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, or X.