I fed the 40k-star "How To Live Better" into my AI and it started doing the math with me

1. Before you bookmark it: advice was never the thing you were missing

Late September, a Chinese repo appeared on GitHub called 《How To Live Better》. One month later: forty thousand stars.

My first reaction was the same as yours — another book of platitudes. Ten minutes in, it turned out not to be. It doesn't moralise, it does arithmetic. Thirty-four topics, 600+ entries, and every one of them states what you spend (money, time, effort), what you get back (years, money, freedom), how strong the evidence is, and where it came from. It even grades the evidence, and for the weak ones it says out loud: this is the author's judgment, not evidence.

That matters. Most life advice fails because it's only half an answer — it tells you what to do and never what it costs.

But a book has one built-in flaw: it's static. You bookmark it. Then what? It doesn't know you're 35, just laid off, three months behind on social insurance, rent due next week. It can only give you the general answer, and what you need is "does this hold for me, right now".

So this isn't a review of how good the book is. It's how to turn it into an advisor that knows your situation. Half an hour. Every prompt is copy-paste.

2. Find the original first: the one with ~40k stars

Once it went viral, five or six same-named repos appeared overnight. We hit the GitHub API on each while writing this (2026-10-05) — stars and last-commit dates fetched live, not recalled.

Fastest tell: the original sits under an organization account (eternity4719), not a personal one. It was created 2026-09-07 and crossed 40k stars in a month.

One correction: the "37,000 stars" going around in video scripts was a few days old. It's 40k now. Repos like this move daily — don't anchor on a stale number.

If digging through GitHub is tiring, search it on Skills (skills.guanliai.com). It indexes 8,800+ agent skills with a page each, including every one we use below.

3. Step-by-step: turn it into an advisor you can call (prompts ready to copy)

1. Installing a skill is copying a folder

2. Don't make it re-read the book every time — pack it

Most people get this first step wrong. They hand the book to the AI and say "read this and answer me". That's asking an intern to re-read six hundred pages from page one, every single time. Slow, and by the end they've forgotten the beginning.

Pack it instead, so only the relevant chapter gets opened:

Pack everything at https://github.com/eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter into an agent skill
under ~/.claude/skills/life-guide/. Requirements:
1. In SKILL.md, state when to invoke it (life decisions, health, money, legal,
   moving abroad, career) and when not to (purely technical questions);
2. Split the 34 topics into 34 md files under references/, keeping every entry's
   cost, benefit, evidence grade and original source. Drop none of the four;
3. Cite as "topic + entry number", e.g. "Medical 12", so I can check the original;
4. When an entry is graded C, you must say out loud: this is the author's
   judgment, not evidence.
When done, tell me how many entries you indexed and which topics are largest.

3. Make it go read the source for you

Every entry carries a citation, but papers get updated and policies move. Pick the one you're actually about to act on and make it check:

Use research-ops to verify "Medical 12" from life-guide:
- Find the original paper or official document it cites, with a link;
- Check whether anything published after 2025 overturns or narrows the finding;
- Separate clearly what the evidence supports from what is the author's
  cost-benefit judgment;
- End with one line: should I act on this now, and why.
Primary sources only. No aggregators, no blog commentary.

4. Get someone who argues back

What you're short of isn't advice. It's someone willing to say "you didn't count that". That's grilling — it comes at you one round at a time:

I'm going to keep paying social insurance myself, 1,800 a month, for 15 years.
Use grilling on me: one point at a time, wait for my answer before the next,
aim at the math I haven't done and the outcome I'm most afraid of. Stop after 8 rounds.

Honestly, this part is often uncomfortable. Good. Left to yourself, you steer neatly around the question you're most afraid of.

5. Compress it into something you could send to family

Don't stop at "I'll think about it". What you can't think through, you can usually write through:

Write the social insurance question above as a 1-3-1 brief:
one question (what we're actually solving), three options (each with cost,
risk, worst case), one recommendation plus the reason. Under 400 words,
readable by a family member.

6. Don't let the conclusion die in a chat log

The step everyone skips, and the one you'll regret in three months. A conclusion that isn't filed is a calculation you'll redo:

Write this conclusion into my Obsidian note "decisions/social-insurance":
the situation at the time, what I chose, the options I dropped and why,
and which life-guide entries it rested on. Remind me to revisit in a year.

7. The going-abroad bit

When you have to submit documents, visa-doc-translate saves the back-and-forth:

Use visa-doc-translate on these 6 documents. Output a bilingual PDF with
original and translation side by side. Keep proper nouns (names, institutions,
ID numbers) untranslated.

4. What the book can't cover, these can

One general book can't go deep on the specialised directions. Same procedure — API called on each, 2026-10-05.

If that's too many: health goes to informed-patient, contracts to ai-legal-claude, money math to ai-finance-claude, and anything you're unsure about gets a round of grilling first.

5. Straight talk: who this is for, who it isn't, and where you'll trip

For: people whose "read later" folder is a graveyard; people who keep re-deciding the same things about work, money, law and health. You don't have to be rigorous — willing to open the citation once is enough.

Not for: anyone who wants the AI to make the life decision. Every entry lists a cost and a benefit, which means the book assumes you're the decider. The AI can lay out the accounts and the evidence. It can't sign for you.

The good part's over. Now the ugly:

6. What you're probably wondering (FAQ)

Which repo is the original?

eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter — organization account, CC-BY-4.0, verified 39,989 stars on 2026-10-05. The same-named ones are readers, mini-programs or regional adaptations built on top of it.

I can't code. Can I still do this?

Yes. Installing a skill is copying a folder. The only thing you type is the packing prompt in step 2, and that's copy-paste.

600+ entries — won't that be slow?

No. You're loading files, not context; only the matching topic gets read. What's slow is "read the whole thing, then answer" — which is exactly why step 2 splits it into 34 files.

Are there French or Spanish versions?

There are community adaptations: madkoding/HowToLiveBetter-CL is the Chilean Spanish one (568 entries). French, Russian and others circulate as community reading sites rather than branches of the original. I haven't checked those translations entry by entry — look at who translated it and which version before you cite it.

Can I act on this advice directly?

For health, check the evidence grade and whether your situation matches. Legal, tax and social-insurance entries are jurisdiction-bound; most assume mainland China rules, so re-check local rules before or after moving.

Why run humanizer at the end?

AI conclusions drift into "in conclusion" phrasing that you stop noticing and your family can't read. humanizer changes the voice, not the facts.

7. Sources and where to go next

• eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter (original)
• cdyforever/how-to-live-better (single-page reader)
• DrCatHicks/informed-patient
• zubair-trabzada/ai-legal-claude
• blader/humanizer
• Agent Skill open format spec

One small thing you can do right now: open Skills, search grilling, install it, and type in the thing you've been putting off deciding — then let it interrogate you for eight rounds. You don't need to read the book first. Getting stuck is how you find out what you were missing.

Bottom line

The book tells you which advice is worth doing; the skill tells you whether it holds for you. Pack the original, verify with research-ops, push back with grilling, compress with 1-3-1, file it in Obsidian — five steps, and your bookmarks folder finally does something.