justin․searls․co
Breaking Change artwork

v57 - Go Pace Yourself

Breaking Change

Video of this episode is up on YouTube:

Unlike Sam Altman, I sat down and did the math by hand to calculate that it would actually be less time to produce the show if I were to livestream it than to edit it after the fact and upload it. The fact I recently got upgraded from 30mbps to 2000mbps upstream might allso have something to do with it: welcome to the first ever LIVE episode of Breaking Change!

I regret to inform you the episode is now over. You can listen like you always do or watch what remains of the recording on YouTube.

It was particularly fun for me to build a production pipeline with updating chyrons, a dynamic salt meter, and on-demand generated stock videos. It's like having a production team, except it manages to crash halfway thru the stream without notice.

As always into the show at podcast@searls.co or via the feedback form.

Stuff we talked about, in order of me talking about them:

Show me them show notes…

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Merge Commits artwork

YAGNI: Retiring from programming

Merge Commits

Matt Swanson had me back on YAGNI to talk about the fallout from DHH's Rails World keynote 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.

Appearing on: YAGNI
Published on: 2026-10-02
Original URL: https://share.transistor.fm/s/192793fc

Comments? Questions? Suggestion of a podcast I should guest on? podcast@searls.co or send feedback.

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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