Justin Searls
I make things that nobody's asking for.
https://justin.searls.co is crossposted to this account via https://POSSEparty.com. Questions? Email me: justin@searls.co
- Is the tool bad or is it a skill issue?
- I bought a Doggett
- New episode of Breaking Change is live! SpaceXXX
- "3 things: reusable rockets, AI via satellite; and a real-time free speech platform. Rockets, space-based AI, and free speech. Rockets, AI…are you getting it? These are not three separate companies, this is one company, and we're calling it SpaceXXX" www.spacex.com/…
- I do not miss thinking hard www.jernesto.com/…
- A recurring theme in coverage on the effect AI will have on wealth/income inequality suggests there's a strong case to be made that AI is going to be bad for poor people. I have nothing useful to add to that discussion, so here's a word I just invented: Agentrification
- Whether or not the Xcode agent is any good (I'm dubious), the fact Xcode itself is exposing first-party MCP tools is great news—trying to get Claude/Codex to do fucking anything right in iOS is agonizing. developer.apple.com/…
- We're gonna need a bigger Shovel…
- Two new searlsbrew projects today: • prove_it: verification-oriented baseline rules and hooks for Claude Code github.com/… • scrapple: scrapes and indexes Apple's SDK docs/videos/sample code github.com/…
- Why is OpenAI so stingy with ChatGPT web search?
- Early in my career, I met a few COBOL developers who came out of retirement in the run-up to January 2000, getting paid $300+ per hour to remediate Y2K bugs when nobody else was left who knew COBOL. Suspect a similar trajectory for highly-skilled, well-rounded "pre-AI" engineers
- Coding agents are a TON of fun if you are (1) extremely ambitious and (2) have middling standards. They are still fun if you are (1) extremely ambitious and (2) ruthlessly exacting standards, but markedly less so.
- Now that I've spent ten hours with Claude Code after a few months with Codex CLI, I can say with confidence: • Claude is much much faster • Claude makes much stupider mistakes much more often, even with Opus 4.5 • With either agent, I end each session frustrated and exhausted
- LOL, also apparently Adobe Premiere on iPad will frequently silently fail when generating captions. And there's no way to export them as text, subtitle files, etc. This is starting to seem like bad software that nevertheless gets recommended to people ceaselessly.
- Trying Adobe Premiere for the first time since version 6.0 in 2002. Paid for Creative Cloud Pro. First thing I tried: start a project on iPad, sync via cloud, finish on my Mac. LOL, nope. Their "cloud" can't sync projects. It's just a one-way, manual upload and import. And slow.
- Hey America, I'm back. What the hell happened.
- Over the last 20 years, my time in Japan felt like Season 1 of Pluribus. A nation acting in harmony, going from happy to see me everywhere I went to constantly signaling they "need some space" In cities, it's thanks to over-tourism. In the country, it's anti-immigrant populism.
- Tooling for coding agents is overly focused on scaling numerous parallel workers instead of ensuring correctness. That continues to be where all my time goes and is the real barrier to scaling up. (e.g., Why am I exploratory testing this UI when vision models could be doing it?)
- This Opus 4.5 failure mode rarely happens with Codex: Claude copy-pasted a source listing by mistake, edited that instead of the correct file, declared success. When I pointed out its error, it confidently asserted: "The code is correct - this is a browser caching issue." 🖕
- "Brakeman, hosted on GitHub under the stewardship of developer Justin Searls—known online as presidentbeef" Pump the brakes, man. www.webpronews.com/…
- Is anyone really surprised that Entropy fell apart over time? www.theblock.co/…
- After hearing lots of Opus 4.5 hype, I decided to switch to Claude Code this month from Codex CLI (with which I have a separate set of frustrations), and I've learned two things: 1. Claude Code is significantly more productive (parallel by default) and generally smarter (smarter coding... continued
- I wonder how many people accidentally book hotels in Akasaka because they mixed up the pronunciation of Asakusa.
- Commuter trains in Tokyo are so packed that the tip of my iPhone triggered proximity contact sharing via AirDrop with the passenger next to me. I didn't want to admit it was a mistake, so we're getting lunch together now. Will probably be in his wedding at this rate.
- Look on the bright side, Apple chose not to ruin Aperture's icon last week. ikennd.ac/…
- Given that it's just as often programmers who have no clue what to build with the coding capacity offered by AI agents, I WOULD say the issue is that many people are horribly uncreative. simonwillison.net/…
- Twenty years working on Windows command line tools? Glad the dude is retiring but I'm sure he's a shell of his former self. tech.slashdot.org/…
- I played Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo so you don't have to tell me that it's strawberry season in Japan in January
- Over the last year, every SaaS app launch has been followed by a competing vibe-coded clone app within days or weeks. Time to update the Silicon Valley shitheel lexicon: TIRED: "Fast follow" WIRED: "Sloppy seconds"
- A better macOS Globe key
- New clip! Shenmue was educational software
- Jerod Santo, the co-host/co-founder of The Changelog, has joined the POSSE party! If he can figure out how to set it up, I have faith you can, too. jerodsanto.net/…
- I would simply start a podcast. www.wsj.com/…
- Documentary music video of my experience getting out of bed at my Japanese Airbnb this morning. Easy to take whole home central air conditioning for granted youtu.be/…
- AI companies touting scale as how much electricity they consume is insane. Should steel companies report output via CO2 emissions? If more efficient technology comes requiring less power, how do you handle having trained analysts to equate power consumption with success?
- For anyone who wants to see my self-deleting wisps but isn't in the habit of checking a web page every day and doesn't want to follow stories on Instagram (🙋♂️), you can catch them in your feed reader! Subscribe to justin.searls.co/…
- What happened to Japanese men? When I was in college, everyone respected onsen etiquette—washing before entering a public bath. Today, the majority just splash water on their junk and jump in the water Worldwide, right-wing political lurches seem to give men cover to be assholes
- I must admit, Japan's wholesome spin on absurdist nationalism is cuter than what we've got going on in the states. Leading morning news in Tokyo is the "drum diplomacy" between Japan's PM and Korea's President youtu.be/…
- Oh, Apple. Scheduled a "Send Later" iMessage to Becky for 10 AM yesterday, but because of time zone changes I never experienced 10 AM yesterday and instead of scheduling based on a real timestamp it just left the message in a permanent unsent state. Great job, everyone.
- It is Twenty Fucking Twenty Six and iMessage still thinks that a phone number without a country code and a phone number with a country code belong in the same message thread (good!) but different contacts (bad!). What am I supposed to do? Save +1 and non +1 variants for every US phone n... continued
- The reviews are in! Melatonin supplements are a far less effective sleep aid for long flights than straight whiskey.
- Here's a direct revenue idea for the airlines: Informed Seat Selection. Prior to choosing a seat, passengers pay $89 to preview the security photos on file for the passengers booked next to them. Bonus: dynamic pricing based on historical desirability of each passenger.
- I'm a shameless iPhone Air booster, but this is killing me: iPhone 17 supports DisplayPort over USB-C: www.apple.com/… iPhone Air doesn't: www.apple.com/… So much for watching movies on smart glasses on my flight to Tokyo 🤦♂️
- Back in college during my study abroad in Japan, I met a jackass from the UK who got pissed when me and my friends kept referring to "soccer" when "the rest of the world calls it football." It was fun to be the one to inform him that in Japan they call it soccer.
- PSA: iPhone Air MagSafe Battery can charge your AirPods
- Just got mad at my coding agent and corrected it and ended the message with "Capisce?" I have apparently become my late aunt Erminia.
- Yet again, I finally sit down to tackle something I've been procrastinating for a month because I was afraid it would be a huge pain in the ass, only to be proven right and it really is a huge pain in the ass, which just reinforces that I should procrastinate even more in the future.
- New episode of Breaking Change is live! Saving Face Oil
- Peter Campbell's giraffe art
- TIL that I'm the Napoleon of open source maintenance effectiviology.com/…
