Justin Searls
@searls.bsky.social
I make things that nobody's asking for. I used to post things that nobody was asking for, but then I stopped. Learn about me at https://justin.searls.co or reach out to justin@searls.co
I always challenge new models to take on work I wouldn't have previously assumed they could accomplish. Kudos to Astra. I asked if it could edit the audio of my latest podcast in Logic (explaining what that meant), and it trepidatiously noped out before even attempting it lol
Something I find befuddling: advances in AI-generated images, video, music, code, prose, and problem solving continue to legitimately impress me. And yet, somehow, I've never seen an LLM produce a marketing tagline that wasn't total dogshit. What gives?
There is a massive amount of arbitrage opportunity right now for competent agent-wielding developers. Want to get rich in the next 5 years? 1. Find a niche enterprise software domain 2. Poach a well-connected sales guy as a cofounder 3. Undercut and outperform the incumbents
Developing native Apple apps is generally much slower and tedious with agents than building web applications. That said, platform constraints can be liberating—with exactly one or two possible ways to accomplish something, an agent can monkey-on-typewriter until it figures it out
New policy at Searls LLC: humans never touch spreadsheets again. Now have agent skills that will do all the grunt work and tedium to file expenses, document philanthropy, and rebalance mom's portfolio. Latest version of Codex is even competent in Apple Numbers.
Wish I knew a programmer with the last name Holland so I could annoy them by insistently referring to Claude as Mr. Holland's Opus.
Interviewing Zach Holman this morning on Hot Fix about AI and our discontents. Have something you want us to talk about? Let me know: justin.searls.co/…
My trusty iPhone Air just tumbled down a full flight of stairs at high speed without a single scuff, much less a scratch or crack. Still my favorite physical design for an iPhone.
In the last 24 hours I have received dozens of e-mails that open with an LLM-generated line about something I wrote or said in my podcast. Then the rest of the email is an exhortation to try some cursed vibe-coded developer tool. The race to the bottom can't end soon enough.
Experiencing the common cold for the first time since I had turbinate reduction surgery and holy shit, this is how noses are supposed to work? You blow your nose and mucus comes out? And you can breathe all week long? Christ, you all had it good no wonder I was mad all the time
The vast majority of programmers are late adopters. They don't follow programming news. They show up, do the job, go home. They may hear about things through the grapevine. They might go to a conference every 2 years. But they typically don't take the time to play with new stuff
If I could go back in time 20 years and tell myself one thing, it would be this: "whatever it is, don't bother programming it if there's any way you can put it off until mid-2025."
New iPhone 18 Pro is much better at staying cool in the Florida sun but it's still no match for a 65°C far infrared sauna. 🧖♂️
Can't wait for iPhone Duo. Haven't had a folding phone since iPhone 6 Plus.
It is very surprising that disabling iPhone/iPad auto-lock (say, changing from "3 minutes" to "Never") doesn't require an authentication step. Bad actor with temporary access to your device could enable it and wait until you leave your phone out and fail to explicitly lock it.
I complete agree coding agents make software engineering harder, but the rub is that many professional software engineers are pretty bad at these new hard things and it's hard to see how they're not totally screwed. simonwillison.net/…
I read way too many comments about DHH's Rails World keynote, and the substantive arguments seem pretty thin. Some people who love Ruby and Rails seem to feel disappointed/depressed/afraid to be told the things they care about don't matter anymore. www.reddit.com/…
For seemingly the sixth time in my career, DHH has arrived at the same conclusion I have—this time, that AI coding means we should be building more native apps, because development cost is no longer the bottleneck—but the way he goes about talking about it couldn't be more different youtu.be/…
Across my 6 iOS apps, each GitHub issue is automatically triaged and assigned by an orchestrator agent to be implemented by a subagent UNLESS it's been labeled as "human" for specification or verification reasons. At this point, less than 10% of issues are labeled "human"
Opus 5.5 seems impressively competent and snappy! Get all your work done now before they nerf it to hell next week.
Apple has been extremely cagey around usage limits for Private Cloud Compute, only sharing that subscribers of higher tiers of iCloud+ are allowed more usage. Well, my apps make liberal use of Apple's language models and I'm now constantly hitting my PCC usage limits. Welp!
It's too bad Amphetamine for macOS is free. Given how many engineers' AI workflows depend on keeping their MacBooks awake at all hours, if only they'd charged a subscription they probably could have raised $50M at a $3B valuation by now.
First impressions: Series 12 is a massive performance improvement. Siri AI is much faster than on the 11, and for the first time the podcast app can actually play and download shows on demand without crapping out multiple times.
Glad people are reporting success with Siri AI, but I never had a single positive experience with it all summer. Three times yesterday I watched it spin endlessly, reply "I don't understand" to banal requests, or just blink and disappear. pogueman.substack.com/…
Codex is extremely frustrating in that when you send "steering" instructions reminding it to do the work in a certain way, it will almost always reply to acknowledge the request and then STOP ALL WORK. I've tried coaxing it to keep working in AGENTS.md/…, but no luck.
A skill we need to learn is how to ratchet up our ambitions until we uncover what the models truly cannot do. And each time they're improved, to once again test the fences. Confidence and certainty in one's own workflow have become trademark signs of ignorance and complacency.
So I guess we're all just agreed that, "it's not against the law if an AI agent does it," then? www.strix.ai/…
By far the biggest change in the agentic coding era has been that I'm no longer chained to my computer all day. Just got more done by sending a few messages from my iPhone on the driving range than I would normally achieve in an eight-hour work day at my desk.
