Overriding Code: A 120,000-Character Manifesto on Taming AI and Architecting a Digital Altar
Prologue: The 120,000 Characters from the Endless Abyss to the Curatorial Altar
Spanning over 120,000 Chinese characters in the original Cantonese, this is a faithful, unabridged archive of my raw conversations with AI. It records, without omission, the blood, sweat, and tears of a creator with zero HTML background—someone whose opening battle cry was simply: “Skip the difficulty assessment. I know how to copy and paste.” It is the story of how I wrestled with an artistically bankrupt machine and built a digital art installation from scratch.
I initially assumed that with AI, any visual I wanted was just one prompt away. I soon discovered that the moment you let go of the reins, the machine will happily vomit up an “unprecedented, world-class aesthetic disaster.” For a “fragmented and scattered” layout, and for a graffiti-style information box that materializes on hover like a genie from a lamp, I endured countless cycles of “solve one problem, create ten more.” At times, watching the code grow worse with every AI “fix,” I felt less like I was building a skyscraper than descending into an abyss, with the foundations I had painstakingly laid nearly destroyed beneath me.
I assume most people would settle for a neat, familiar-looking layout once the machine produced something vaguely respectable. Not me. I refuse to build the digital equivalent of a cluttered dollar store. Nor will I settle for flashy optical spectacle devoid of meaning. I demand restraint. I want the spatial grandeur and caliber of a premier art space, carved out of negative space. I am not building a convenient blog for mundane journaling; I am establishing a curatorial design aesthetic. So even the most basic web elements—”NEXT / BACK” buttons, or a built-in “All Posts” archive—will be ruthlessly guillotined the moment they violate that aesthetic philosophy or disrupt the immersive experience.
This blood-and-tears chronicle, left completely uncut and stripped of all sugarcoating, is no orthodox programming tutorial. It is a demonstration of how common sense and intuition can stop a runaway machine lost in coordinate calculations; of how, when AI tries to drag everything toward mediocrity, a human obsession with extreme aesthetic standards can snap it back to attention and force it out of the endless abyss.
If you are tired of cookie-cutter websites and want to know what it takes to tame AI into creating an artwork that overrides everything, take your time and devour this sprawling raw archive.
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