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Justin Searls

@searls.bsky.social
2.1K followers 83 following 698 posts

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 justin.searls.co or reach out to justin@searls.co

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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 23m
Recursive code review: 1. Orchestrator assigns implementer subagent 2. Reviewer subagent hunts for bugs 3. Orchestrator vets findings; implementer fixes real ones 4. Repeat 2–3 until no valid findings remain Typically takes 2–8 rounds.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 1h
Just filled my car with gas for the first time since February or March, and it cost $4.22 a gallon Then sent a single document to Japan via FedEx, and they charged me over $100 for the cheapest/slowest rate—almost half of which was fuel surcharges. Very cool and totally normal.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 4h
A lot is riding on local models becoming "good enough" for agentic coding workflows. The fact I've gone from "I only trust Fable and Astra" to "Opus 5.5 is just as good as either" to "Sonnet 5.5 is basically good enough" in less than a month is augurs well for future local LLMs
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 15h
Over a year ago, I stopped reading code and started automating adversarial agents to perform recursive code reviews instead. The result: low-defect systems that do what I want. Can't believe anyone engaging seriously with these tools still believes human code review is superior
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 18h
I just realized that a Danish is just an open-faced jelly doughnut. This changes everything.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 20h
Don't sleep on Sonnet 5.5, I pushed four extremely ambitious features across several iOS apps today with Opus 5.5 dispatching a gob-smacking number of Sonnet agents and still haven't hit 20% of my weekly cap in about 9 hours of wall time. Features turned out great. Impressed.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Release it for visionOS, you cowards! www.digitalfoundry.net/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Taking Breaking Change LIVE for the first time this morning. Plan to kick off around 9 AM eastern in <30 minutes. Built some fun AI production tools this weekend to play with, too. I promise to be bad at this. Tune in! youtube.com/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
At this rate, we're gonna get a PC port of GTA 6 a year before a PC port of GTA 6 comes out. kotaku.com/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Was burning through both the Codex and Claude $200 plans just triaging SwiftUI issues across my suite of apps. Told it to abort UI testing after at most one fix attempt and token consumption dropped 80%. I have become the impatient manager telling devs to quit testing so much.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
These open-source AI nerds are pretty rude. Don't you know you aren't supposed to ask a model their weight?
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I explained to Becky that my $400 AI subscriptions don't actually pay for tokens. They pay for a 10-20x multiple of some base level of an unspecified amount of "usage", and that said base amount of usage changes arbitrarily without notice. It sounds pretty stupid when you say it
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
2016: Developers are too expensive to waste time verifying software manually, so make computers run automated tests. 2026: Agents are too expensive to waste tokens running automated tests, so make developers verify software manually.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Hey Claude, I would like to take two strokes off my golf game.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
New episode of Breaking Change is live! Zach Holman wants more of everything
justin.searls.co
Zach Holman wants more of everything
Zach Holman (https://zachholman.com), founder of Signed (https://signed.com), joins me for another 🔥Hotfix (/posts/whats-the-hot-fix/)🔥. Zach wants more of everything. Let's see what we can do about that. Write into the show at podcast@searls.co.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
People have been begging David to loosen his grip on Rails or even to walk away entirely for 20 years. Now that he's signaling interest in walking away, the same people are pissed as hell. Smart.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Seems like Anthropic cut the Opus 5.5 allowance last week. Ran out of weekly usage on a 20x plan 4 days in. Spent that last day optimizing my workflows to be more token efficient, and now I'm 38 hours since using my free reset and I'm already halfway thru my weekly cap.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
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
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
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?
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
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
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
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
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
New episode of Merge Commits is live! YAGNI: Retiring from programming
justin.searls.co
YAGNI: Retiring from programming
Matt Swanson had me back on YAGNI (https://yagni.fm) to talk about the fallout from DHH's Rails World keynote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY) and what it means for your weekend. We discuss what happens to the "one-person framework" when agents write the code, how frustrating it is when something is absolutely correct but still misses the point, and how I've accidentally constructed a dark factory with agents building and maintaining my iOS apps. We also get into what I'd tell developers who are worried about where all this is heading and why World of Warcraft is my dark horse candidate to beat Grand Theft Auto 6 in November.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
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/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
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
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
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
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
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."
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
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. 🧖‍♂️
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Can't wait for iPhone Duo. Haven't had a folding phone since iPhone 6 Plus.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
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/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
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/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
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/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
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"
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Opus 5.5 seems impressively competent and snappy! Get all your work done now before they nerf it to hell next week.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
A players hire A agents and B players hire C agents.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
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!
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
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/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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/…
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
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.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Say what you will about macOS Tahoe, but it accomplished the longest uptime I've ever experienced on a Mac (131 days, 40 mins) after 4+ months overseas. I tapped the dusty keyboard, and it immediately woke up my janky 6K Dell display as if I'd never left.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
iOS 27's nifty Captive WiFi feature
justin.searls.co
iOS 27's nifty Captive WiFi feature
Haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, but I was tickled to discover that iOS 27 ships with a keyboard completion that will fill wi-fi details into captive portals you've previously filled out before.
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Justin Searls @searls.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
A friend wrote to say that my "Full-breadth Developers" essay is aging frustratingly well, in his estimation. Is it? I'm not nearly employed enough to have a good read on things. justin.searls.co/…
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