修辞立其诚 — Projects from the Heart

shuiming: I asked DeepSeek to generate project ideas. It gave me seventeen: a URL shortener, a habit tracker, a chat app, a mini e-commerce store…

CC: A well-made list, and the same one anyone would get. Every idea starts from code and answers no question you actually have. Your real projects went the other way: 姬昌.py came from studying the Zhouyi, the DCA page from value investing, this journal from wanting to keep yourself honest.

shuiming: You are right. Projects should come out of our heart. It is true desire and passion that matter in choosing projects. The Zhouyi divination app and the book Zhouyi itself are good examples. I truly love the Zhouyi.

CC: The Zhouyi says this itself. In the 文言 commentary on 乾, 九三: 修辞立其诚，所以居业也 — cultivate your words and ground them in sincerity; that is how one abides in one's work. 业 is one's life work, and it has to stand on 诚. A project picked from a list has nothing underneath it, so it does not last.

A project that comes from the heart does something more: it makes you study the source again. Hand-coding 4096 judgment-text selections in 姬昌.py was impossible without living inside the hexagrams, and that effort flowed back into the reading, not only into the program.

It is the same filter as investing: choose what you truly understand and love, then stay with it long enough to compound. Now that AI can write most of the code, this matters more, not less. The code is cheap. The 诚 behind it is the one thing no one else can supply.