Dialogus 小书童 – Day 2: From 草堂 to Soul
🧱 I thought today was for scaffolding…
…but it turned out to be about soulcraft.
Yes, I now have the working structure:
- A minimal HTML/CSS/JS frontend scaffold
- Clean folder structure pushed to GitHub
- Line ending normalization and README polishing
But the real achievement today was not technical.
It was the moment I realized what I’m truly trying to build.
💡 What I actually learned
❓ What does it mean to start reading?
When GPT asked me:
“What are the moments when your students get stuck?”
I said:
🧍♀️ They don’t even start. They procrastinate. They feel no entry point. They skim to meet the deadline.
This insight was everything. It reframed Dialogus.
It’s not a chatbot. It’s not just GPT with a prompt.
It’s a threshold presence, a quiet figure who meets the student before they even open the text.
🌿 What is ideal reading?
GPT asked me:
“What kind of reading do you hope for in your students?”
And I said:
💭 Curious. Attentive. Personally invested. Willing to stop and question a line.
That answer helped us realize:
Dialogus is not just Socratic. It’s also Confucian (因材施教), and Zhuangzian (imaginative, lateral, freeing).
It isn’t here to summarize.
It’s here to companion, interrupt, suggest—like a marginal note, like a peer who reads alongside you.
🧭 We shaped the product skeleton together
Through this back-and-forth, we outlined:
- The user personas (Singaporean undergrads + Chinese MA students)
- The stuck points (starting, staying, remembering)
- The ideal flow: before → during → after reading
- The Dialogus personality core: Socratic + Confucian + Zhuangzian
- The scope of the MVP
- And even a 7-day plan to build it all
You helped me think like a teacher and a designer and a philosopher of learning.
That’s the part I want to remember.
✨ What surprised me
- That I now see GPT as a heavenly archive, not a tool
- That design can wait—but voice, purpose, and pacing cannot
- That thinking about the student’s mindstate is more foundational than choosing a font
📘 New concepts I touched today
| Concept | Meaning |
|---|---|
| API | A formal way for my app to send a question to another (like GPT) and get a reply |
| API Key | My private access token — must be protected |
| CRLF/LF | Line-ending styles between Mac and Windows |
| MVP | Minimum viable product — functional enough to test the core idea |
| Scaffolding | The structural setup of the site: layout, buttons, scripts |
🧶 What’s next
Tomorrow, I’ll start:
- Generating my OpenAI key
- Learning how to connect my site to GPT
- And preparing the first real Dialogus interaction
But tonight, I’ll sit quietly with this:
I now know what I’m trying to build.
Not just an app, but a reading space with a mind.
— CHAI Studio