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.

In 2027, I'm publishing a Software Support Matrix for the Searls household to more clearly communicate that I'm never wasting my time fixing another WhatsApp problem, no matter how married I am to you.

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One annoyance with iPhone Duo (just like the 26 series of OS releases last year) is that LLMs are absolutely indignant that no such product exists, and/or jump to the conclusion I'm referring to the discontinued Microsoft Surface Duo without bothering to search first.

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First impressions of Valve's Steam Frame: thumbs down. Coming from the Vision Pro, the image quality just isn't there. Awful screen door effect, proprietary wireless dongle isn't a panacea for streaming, max window size for flat gaming is way too small. Painful strap.

Bummed.

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When agents repeatedly make a thing worse when asked to fix it, the best way I've found to dig myself out of that hole is to start a fresh context and ask them to explain and critique that area of the code before asking for a fix.

It's like jiggling the handle on a broken toilet

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My /speed-run skill lets me pepper an agent with problems and never forces me to wait:

  1. Use app
  2. Complain
  3. Dispatch worker
  4. Conduct adversarial review
  5. Deploy fix to device

Can run for hours, clearing dozens of issues before compacting gist.github.com/searls/0605331c25e839eeac40464d1c65a2e8

A skill that lets you hammer your agent with complaints and never have to wait. It delegates the work and you keep peppering it with every problem you find as it continuously monitors, merges, and redeploys the work. · GitHub
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10 minutes into Claude Duet, it has failed to do every task I've thrown at it. It's kind of wild how Duet, Dots, and (for my purposes) even Muse are still so much less useful than an agent running on open harnesses on an actual computer.

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Six or seven years ago, I mixed up Angie's List with AngelList and at first I felt it was a huge waste of time.

But today, with the job market being what it is, I'm really glad to have a side hustle doing dishwasher repair.

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"If you want something done right, …" has only three valid completions:

  1. "do it yourself"
  2. "loosen your definition of 'right'"
  3. "choose to want that less"
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Now that AI can do all our drudgery-thinkwork for us, there's never been a better time to invest all that excess of mental energy into learning a foreign language.

Super excited to share all the language-learning apps I've been working on. They're really coming together.

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Called a doctor to schedule an appointment while holding iPhone duo (closed) to my ear. They asked to confirm the date, so I unfolded it to look at my calendar. Because the phone automatically switches to speaker when the device opens, it was super seamless.

Nice.

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Started two new iOS apps today. Can almost fill an entire Home Screen with only apps I maintain. And they're not drive by slop—these are my most-used apps!

It's a real problem.

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iPhone Duo is an absolute beast as a developer iterating on app UI. With one build-and-run, a single device can test a UI on the smallest iPhone display and the smallest iPad-size-class display Apple sells. It's been an hour and I'm knocking out SwiftUI issues left and right.

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Initial iPhone Duo score: 9/10

Why? Same reason Gruber and Nilay are slagging on it:

  1. It's an iPad mini you can carry everywhere
  2. It eliminates any need to carry an iPhone

I have wanted to go iPhone-free for a decade. Calling it the worst iPhone but best iPad is awesome!

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The most significant update to the iPhone transfer Ice Pack since the original. Allow me to introduce Ice Pack Duo.

It took time remaining from 50 minutes to 5 minutes within seconds.

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I hate when iOS apps offer a Face ID checkbox at login, because it can mean two wildly different things:

  • Force authentication every time you open the app
  • Skip password authentication in the future

One costs you time, one saves you time. You don't get to know which

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macOS continues to show signs of not being particularly battle-hardened for 24/7 app development by agents. System ran out of file descriptors at some point overnight and let me just say that macOS does not recover well when that happens. Settings are hosed for almost every app

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