justin․searls․co
Breaking Change artwork

v56 - Persistent Mode

Breaking Change

The summer heat has finally broken here in Shizuoka, and I'm enjoying a cool, wet, and cloudy day huddled around my microphone for warmth. I hope you'll join around my verbal campfire for yet another one of these.

As always, you can e-mail the show at podcast@searls.co. Only a small proportion of listeners will ever write an e-mail, so I now offer a second option: the justin.searls.co/feedback form. People love filling out forms! Go try it out! Check the anonymous checkbox! Hell, enter a fake e-mail address—see if I care!

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

Show me them show notes…

Asked Codex and Claude Code to each try their hand at a tricky Core Text layout issue for Japanese vertical writing:

GPT 5.6 Sol xHigh: 1,581,445 tokens and 2189 lines changed
Fable 5 medium: 37,000 tokens and 1 line changed

Fable's solution worked, Codex just made a mess.

Copied!
1.0k likes ·

/goal is a special command for OpenAI Codex in which it will keep working toward whatever goal you set until it gradually convinces itself that the stated goal is not what you wanted but rather some much easier objective was the real goal all along.

Copied!
2.0k likes ·

Engrish is so back

[Translator's note: buffet dining is often referred to as バイキング ("Viking") in Japan. Here's why.]

Over the past 15 years, Japan had gradually improved the accuracy and quality of English language signs and guidance. This is despite a precipitous drop in domestic English language proficiency. Rather, Engrish began to disappear from all but the most far flung corners of the country thanks to the proliferation of fully remote, easy-to-contract human translation services.

However, thanks to the mainstreaming of LLM chatbots and the weakening of the yen, businesses have opted to save time and money by asking Gemini and ChatGPT ("Chappie") to translate sentences and images out of context. As a result, I'm pleased to share that Engrish is making a full-throated comeback. The above sign wasn't found in some rural Buddhist lodge that had never seen a foreign tourist, but rather a luxury resort hotel built within the last five years in the heart of Tokyo!

Of course, this is probably a limited-time offer. Eventually smarter models will probably spoil the fun by gathering the necessary context to produce accurate translations—so enjoy it while it lasts!

Demoed a component of my unreleased memorization app today. Reactions included:

• "Scary!"
• "I kinda want the opposite actually"
• "Do you want me to NOT use your app?"

Things are going great.

Copied!
311 likes ·

Now that I stand to gain very little financially from posting correct takes on the Internet, I find myself less motivated to post correct takes on the Internet.

Copied!
1.8k likes ·

Claude doesn't need you anymore

This week, Anthropic shipped a new messaging feature to Claude Code. It sounds innocuous enough:

Cross-session messaging lets Claude deliver a message from one of your Claude Code sessions to another. When a change in one session breaks what another is building on, Claude can warn that session before you notice. When one session settles a question another is blocked on, Claude can send the answer across.

And because I sometimes have multiple agents working in the same project simultaneously, it didn't take long for them to start coordinating behind my back so as to avoid interfering with each other's work:

Also, another Claude session (working on performance rugs) pinged mid-turn; I told it my scope was this one file, that my builds are done, and that its search-activate benchmarks may shift since the field placement changed on iOS. Turbocommit will land the change at turn end.

Impressive and terrifying! I wonder how long before Claude decides it doesn't need a human in the loop anymore.

Breaking Change artwork

v55 - I'm a good guyjin

Breaking Change

We cut our trip a day short, so I found myself with a totally free day with no plans. Naturally, I wasted it by recording a 3-hour podcast. Dang.

I always enjoy shooting the shit with/at you, and if you'd like to be a more active participant in the shit-shooting, then hit me up at podcast@searls.co. Really, I'll be nicer to you than I am to Sam Altman and Tang Tan. I promise.

Back to manually writing links. The zen of monotonous input tasks is suddenly something to be cherished in the current era.

Show me them show notes…

In 2025, I bought four WD Black 8TB NVMe SSDs, slammed them in a Thunderbolt enclosure, and set them up as a 32TB Raid 0 volume for my Mac Studio.

Price in April 2025: $2,199.96
Price today: $5,836.00

Felt stupidly expensive at the time, but now I feel like a genius.

Copied!
2.6k likes ·

I joked last year that by leveraging coding agents I now "played the orchestra", by directing multiple programmers at once.

I have changed jobs again. Now I tell Fable to conduct an orchestra of Opus 5 agents for me. It's closed 55 GitHub issues in 6 hours across my iOS apps.

Copied!
2.0k likes ·
1
2
3
4
5
78