Deletion Is a Claim, Not a Command: Can “Deleted” Ever Be a Promise?

~ YIN Renlong

After finishing a long investigation into Git deletion, I thought the difficult part was over. The repository had been the experiment; the broader lesson seemed to be that deletion has several observable states. Then a more uncomfortable question appeared. If a system says that something is deleted, what exactly is it claiming, who defines the scope of that claim, and who gets to decide when the process is truly finished?

I documented the original technical investigation in Deleting in Git…
Continue reading →

Deleting in Git and Rethinking (Philosophically) Deletion as a System Design Question

~ YIN Renlong

Yesterday I removed a file that no longer belonged in one of my Git repositories. It had already been committed and pushed several times, so rather than simply deleting the current copy, I decided to clean up the corresponding history as well.

What looked like a straightforward maintenance task became more complicated once I started verifying the result. The file disappeared from the current branch, then from reachable history, but some of the old commit IDs could still be resolved…
Continue reading →

I’ve Almost Completely Forgotten the Code I Wrote a Week Ago…

~ YIN Renlong

Not only can I no longer find the directory where I stored it, but I’ve even forgotten the command I used to run it (Not only can I no longer find the directory where I stored it, but I’ve even forgotten the command I used to run it. I eventually found the solution in my ChatGPT history, but the experience made me reflect on the nature and fragility of memory. I remember doing it. I even wrote a blog post…
Continue reading →

Refreshing the Webpage as an Act of (Artistic) Composition

~ YIN Renlong

My Background Studio began as a practical website feature, but it gradually became a form of browser-native art. Technical writing, photography, animated animals, religious imagery, mathematical structures and Internet vernacular now coexist in compositions generated by twelve algorithms. The central page and its moving margins are complementary: each gives the other a context, rhythm and character that it could not produce alone.

A background that completes the foreground

It would be misleading to divide the website into “important content” and…
Continue reading →

Turning a Theme-Bound Generative Art System into a Maintainable WordPress Plugin

~ YIN Renlong

I began this migration for a practical reason: a background feature that had started as a theme customization had grown into a modular browser-based geometry engine. It still worked, but the theme now owned administration, persistence, mosaics, twelve generators, rendering, and a public badge. I wanted a cleaner boundary without losing the behaviour already proven on the live site.

The result was a site-specific standalone WordPress plugin, a deliberately minimal theme fallback, and a workflow in which the current VPS…
Continue reading →

Deploying a Modular Generative Geometry Generator (Browser-Based)

~ YIN Renlong

After completing the mosaic and scattered-collage stages of my WordPress Background Studio, I began asking a different question: could the system choose a mathematical composition method as well as choosing media? That question changed the project’s category. What began as background randomization became a modular browser-based generative-art engine with twelve algorithms, deterministic seeds, record-aware identity and a deployment process designed for a live, resource-constrained server.

I described the earlier evolution from a repeating background to mosaics and random collage in…
Continue reading →

Rethinking Yin’s Background Studio with Agentic AI (When the Harness Joins the Project)

~ YIN Renlong

I built Yin’s Background Studio through a semi-automated conversation: AI proposed bounded changes, I ran them on a live WordPress server, and the resulting logs and screenshots determined the next move. The system eventually grew from one repeating background into classic mosaics, scattered collage, persistence, density and colour controls. Now I want to try the next workflow seriously: let an agent inspect, edit, run, see and verify the project itself.

The existing method is my evidence base, not the method…
Continue reading →