justin․searls․co

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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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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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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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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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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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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