justin․searls․co

On one hand, I'm glad that this fleet of agents is finally taking full advantage of the resources on my Ultra-class Mac Studio.

On the other hand, I'm a little annoyed that redlining macOS in ways that manual human activity never could (24/7 sustained memory, disk, and CPU pressure) results in kernel panics and data loss as often as it does.

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Many of the same people who were incredulous about the iPhone Air's camera and durability all seem to be hyped out of their minds for iPhone Duo, which has a comparably bad camera and is certifiably less durable. The thing's literally an Air with extra pieces that can break!

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Recursive code review:

  1. Orchestrator assigns implementer subagent
  2. Reviewer subagent hunts for bugs
  3. Orchestrator vets findings; implementer fixes real ones
  4. Repeat 2–3 until no valid findings remain

Typically takes 2–8 rounds.

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Just filled my car with gas for the first time since February or March, and it cost $4.22 a gallon

Then sent a single document to Japan via FedEx, and they charged me over $100 for the cheapest/slowest rate—almost half of which was fuel surcharges.

Very cool and totally normal.

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A lot is riding on local models becoming "good enough" for agentic coding workflows.

The fact I've gone from "I only trust Fable and Astra" to "Opus 5.5 is just as good as either" to "Sonnet 5.5 is basically good enough" in less than a month is augurs well for future local LLMs

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Over a year ago, I stopped reading code and started automating adversarial agents to perform recursive code reviews instead.

The result: low-defect systems that do what I want. Can't believe anyone engaging seriously with these tools still believes human code review is superior

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Don't sleep on Sonnet 5.5, I pushed four extremely ambitious features across several iOS apps today with Opus 5.5 dispatching a gob-smacking number of Sonnet agents and still haven't hit 20% of my weekly cap in about 9 hours of wall time. Features turned out great. Impressed.

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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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