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.
Reading this, I feel good about not jumping to conclusions about the RubyGems situation. The narrative that Shopify is the bad guy was quick to spread, but evidence never followed. And the most compelling facts are still not public. byroot.github.io/opensource/ruby/2025/10/09/dear-rubyists.html
Who the hell called it a Strategic Advisory Firm and not a SWOT Team?
This post is both correct and irrelevant. If you get paid to write "good enough" code, agents are already faster—so it's rational for employers to expect you use them. I get 3x more done with agents, but the experience is so frustrating I hate coding now hojberg.xyz/the-programmer-identity-crisis/
Any Fastmail users have advice on managing spam? I've always heard that its spam filter is "nearly as good as Gmail", but in practice I get ~10-15 cold-call B2B drip campaign emails get through me today, even though I always banish them to the Junk folder to train it.
Coding agents have really improved my self esteem. It used to be that I'd get mad at myself when I couldn't get my code to work. Now I get mad at the computer when it can't get my code to work.
TIL the macOS Terminal app has a shortcut to open URLs. Mouse over the URL and hold command + double-click.
Been there for over 20 years. Damn.
Got a few more Sora invites. Email me justin at searls dot co if you want one and tell me what you'd make with it.
TFW your friend accidentally jailbreaks Sora to reveal your human verification recording blog.davemo.com/posts/2025-10-03-sora-bugs.html
Good post by Dave Mosher. It'd be great if leaders always provided the necessary clarity, but that's out of your control. Instead, equip yourself with the tools & mindset to gain alignment early rather than learn you actually had things wrong much later blog.davemo.com/posts/2025-10-01-brilliant-not-resilient.html
For anyone who wants to be deepfake buddies, here's my Sora profile. 🫠 sora.chatgpt.com/profile/searls
Without this post, it would require a conspiracy on the scale of a mass corporate takeover to explain Ruby Central's actions. In context, Occam's razor suggests a much smaller incident represented the last straw following a decade of unresolved conflict justin.searls.co/posts/why-im-not-rushing-to-take-sides-in-the-rubygems-fiasco/
Zach couldn't have asked for a better pull-quote from me for his new Calendearing product. calendearing.com/
Updated yesterday's post, adding a link to a contemporaneously-uploaded copy of the leaked Ruby Together board minutes that proposed charging for access to install RubyGems scribd.com/document/358730907/2016-12-01-Ruby-Together-2016-Board-Meeting-Agenda-and-Minutes
Timely reminder that the email address for questions you'd like me to answer on Breaking Change is podcast@searls.co
Proposal: move RubyGems (the gem and bundler CLI tools) to the same Ruby org that governs the language itself.
It's an accident of history that Ruby, its dependency tools, and its dependency hosting are managed by three separate entities. (And it hasn't gone great.)
The only difference between GPT-5 and GPT-5-codex is that the codex variant is capable of deleting code without leaving a comment like # removed code in its place.
One year ago today, I gave my final conference talk.
And, you know what? Wouldn't change a thing. justin.searls.co/tubes/2024-11-09-11h03m00s/
I keep thinking about the guy who dismissed coding agents by postulating there ought to be a flood of shovelware that hasn't materialized. A huge number of developers are still in denial these tools are useful. That's why I've started badging my agent-coded projects as Certified Shovelware, and you should too! justin.searls.co/shovelware/
So much for OpenAI running out of money by the end of the year. nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/openai-and-nvidia-announce-strategic-partnership-to-deploy-10gw-of-nvidia-systems
Use chatbots as tools, not friends. If you use ChatGPT or Claude, turn off memory and the ability to reference past chats. It only wastes context, assuming present-you wants what past-you wants.
Turned it off months ago and responses are way better. When you have memory enabled you effectively never one-shot anything. Every request is inherently multi-shot.