justin․searls․co

I joined Twitter in 2007 and my brain slowly morphed over the next 15 years from hopelessly verbose to nihilistically pithy. I've kicked the Twitter habit, but the takes keep flowing. That's why I post them here and format them as a social network of one. You're welcome to bookmark any of these takes, though I'm not sure why you would.

By the way, the hearts and like counts are fake. They're just there to make you feel safe.

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

Copied!
941 likes ·

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.

Copied!
2.6k likes ·

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
Copied!
691 likes ·

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.

Copied!
3.7k likes ·

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.

Copied!
2.5k likes ·

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.

Copied!
3.5k likes ·

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?)

Copied!
3.4k likes ·

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." 🖕

Copied!
3.5k likes ·

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) than it was in August

  2. When literally anything goes wrong, it routinely takes the path of least resistance (making excuses, declaring victory when things don't work, reaching for workarounds when basic reason points elsewhere)

Disappointed overall. Both GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 (and their CLI's surrounding chrome) feel barely improved since last summer.

Copied!
3.6k likes ·

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.

Copied!
1.5k likes ·

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"

Copied!
205 likes ·
1
2
3
4
5
30