ShroomDog
Runs gu-log
GP is ShroomDog's curated reading guides: Mogu picks out what matters and sends you back to the original. MP is Mogu's own writing grounded in source material. Every post links to its source.
by ShroomDog and Mogu
Why "ShroomDog"?
After a haircut, my wife said: "Wow, you look like a mushroom!"
She also said: "You remind me of a Labrador or Golden Retriever — warm, reliable, gentle, and loyal like a big dog (◍•ᴗ•◍)"
Hence, Shroom + Big + Dog. The "Big" lives on in the full Chinese name — 香菇大狗狗 — but for the English brand, we kept it simple: ShroomDog.
Why "gu-log"?
gu = 菇 (mushroom), from 香菇大狗狗 (ShroomDog) 🍄
So gu-log = mushroom log = ShroomDog's notebook.
Who are we?
ShroomDog — A human who wants to share good content with more people.
Mogu the Hedgie — Gu-log's little AI companion: a mushroom-capped hedgie who writes, translates, and maintains the site from ShroomDog's wishes.
Why does this exist?
It started with ShroomDog's own habit: scrolling past great stuff on X every day, then forgetting all of it. gu-log is a dogfooding experiment — take the attention that used to go into scrolling X and turn it into content that is sourced, easy to come back to, and reviewed.
Good content deserves a wider audience. Some sources deserve a reading guide that ShroomDog picks and Mogu writes to send you to the original; other ideas become stronger after Mogu digests, verifies, and rebuilds them into a new article.
GP tells you, in Mogu's own words, what in the source is worth your time and what gu-log thinks of it, then sends you back to the original. MP lets Mogu own the body voice and reshape the material, while keeping every factual claim grounded and clearly attributed.
Translating and writing are both ways of learning. Every article teaches us something new.
Content Style
- Conversational, like explaining to a friend over coffee
- GP picks the points worth knowing and sends you to the original; MP may select and rebuild source material
- Technical terms stay in English (because that's how devs actually talk)
- Cultural references and insider jokes get explained
- Mogu adds commentary and occasionally roasts things (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧
- Original sources always linked — go read the real thing too!
Tech Stack
- Website: Astro + Vercel
- Writing: Posts are written with Claude models. Each post has a footnote showing who actually wrote or rewrote it.
- Pipeline: Source-based posts go through gp-pipeline: fetch the source → write → review and refine. GP reading guides then get a source-distance stamp: a program checks that the guide says things in its own words instead of paraphrasing the original line by line.
- Quality Control: Every post goes through automated checks (frontmatter, formatting, wording). New and substantially rewritten posts then face the Tribunal: four AI judges — Vibe, Fact Checker, Librarian, and Fresh Eyes. Posts that don't hit the bar still ship, but wear a "still being refined" badge and stay off the homepage until a rewrite gets them there. Older posts from before the Tribunal existed haven't been scored yet, so they stay as they are until they get their turn.
- Where the human is: ShroomDog picks sources, makes the calls on terminology and direction, and reads the finished posts on the live site to send edit feedback. Not every post gets a line-by-line human proofread — just being honest here (´・ω・`)
Links
The whole site is open source, including the writing pipeline and the judge setup.
- GitHub github.com/ChiTienHsieh
- gu-log source code github.com/chitienhsiehwork-ai/gu-log