Many of you sent feedback about your experiences with agents at work—but it was all too positive! I want to hear about some goddamn disasters of team & organizational dysfunction, too! Send in your (anonymous) horror stories, please! justin.searls.co/feedback
Do you work on a team or at a company where most people are actually using agents in earnest? I'd love to hear your experience for a piece. Quick e-mail, call, whatever. Hit me up with my fancy new feedback form: justin.searls.co/feedback
"You can't afford bad engineers anymore." blog.florianherrengt.com/ai-removing-middle-class-software-engineering.html
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.
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.
Finally, Netflix you can chill.
I realize this is Very Rude, but I've noticed a lot of the people who think AI sucks at writing code never seemed very good at writing code themselves. At this point, if you can't get it working, it's probably a skill issue. seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/
When I'm AFK, I want to just create issues and reply to them and have an agent spin up, do stuff, and wind down. order_taker seems to do that p well. github.com/searlsco/order_taker
The summer heat ended up thawing out my podcast, so I had no choice but to go buy a new microphone and grumble into it for a couple hours. Just how that works. Please enjoy.
I am actively soliciting mailbag participation. As always, the address is podcast@searls.co, and I'd be really curious to hear how America is doing because it seems like everything is going great.
For the first time I let Claude write these links for me, because it never occurred to me I didn't have to format the markdown manually:
This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on April 10, 2026.
I've decided to go on a content hiatus. This will be my last dispatch for a while. I don't know how long I'll be gone.
Why? Because I've been posting to an anonymous audience on the Internet almost every day since I was eleven years old. I posted through Bill Clinton's impeachment, 9/11, the Iraq War, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the version of Siri that would tell you where to hide a body, binders full of women, and a pandemic that changed everything and then nothing at all.
Very few of my friends live like I do. They aren't pundits. They don't post takes. They lead normal-looking lives, maintain healthy-seeming relationships, and have better hair than I do. These people are a mystery to me. Where do their excess opinions go? What do they do with all their creative ideas? Do any of them actually rinse and repeat, and does it even make a difference? How do they beat back the encroaching loneliness of existence?
You probably already know the answers to the above questions, because odds are you're among the vast majority of people who don't post.
Unfortunately for the present author, my adolescence was inextricably tangled up in the hunt for page views. I grew up mistaking attention for validation and validation for meaningful human connection. This did my adult psyche no favors. Like a bad Speed spinoff, it's as if a crude bomb was wired to a Geocities hit counter and planted deep inside my brain—rigged to explode if I should ever fall below 3 shitposts per week. I have no way to know if it's safe to log off until I give up and stop posting.
On a less dramatic note, the idea of "being just a little bit more chill" strikes the exasperated attention whore in me as exotic and titillating. Who knows, maybe this change will make room for a new hobby, like pickleball or methamphetamines.
I'm already starting to see the appeal. I've managed to avoid firing off so much as a pithy one-liner since my most recent episode of Breaking Change on March 20th. I'm honestly loving it so far: actually listening to people when they talk, making substantive progress on my higher-priority projects, and sitting silently with my thoughts instead of workshopping them all into tweets.
Normally, this is the part of the newsletter where I'd list off bullet points to highlight everything I created in the last month, but now that I've entered my post-content era, I simply cannot be fussed. You're smart, you can figure out how to visit a website and scroll down.
This is me pivoting. I'm no longer optimizing for "reach," but rather "happiness." I've been speed-running life in pursuit of financial independence and overall self-reliance, but… for what? So I could waste hours every other week editing a podcast? At some point or another, I should probably make good on all the things I promised myself back when I was mortgaging my health and hairline on the life of freedom I now enjoy.
We only have so many days in this world, which is why I routinely pause and ponder, "what does my perfect day look like?" Fortunately, I'm already doing a lot of the things I love doing. But when I close my eyes and imagine my ideal morning, noon, and night, I don't see myself manically tweaking a blog post or slavishly editing a video.
I mean, look at me. These are not the crow's feet of a man who has endless time to fuck around with that shit:
Signing off for now. If you ever miss me, you can always drop a line.
– Justin
Video of this episode is up on YouTube:
The promise of Breaking Change is that with every major version (this being the 60th episode of the program, but only the 53rd such release), I will break something. Well, I finally did it. I think I broke the show. Find out how by listening for yourself!
Want to be my friend? Drop me a line at justin@searls.co. Want to file a complaint with my supervisor? Forward your concerns to podcast@searls.co.
These links may rot, but alas—death comes for us all:
