February may have been a short month, but I managed to cram the same amount of shit into its slightly smaller bag, anyway. Life outside the Internet continues at a breakneck pace:

• Advised a couple hot new startups, both of which have more to do with helping people than building software, which is always welcome
• Found and rented an apartment in Shizuoka we can use until our condo is ready for move-in come June (technically, two tiny apartments next door to one another—Becky and I are going to be neighbors! 👫)
• Completed our visa applications for the trip and planned a semi-compulsory culinary excursion to Miami to coincide with our appointment at the consulate next week
• Lined up half a dozen doctor's appointments I'd been putting off, on the theory I'd rather deal with what ails me now than be forced to explain golfer's elbow in Japanese—which, of course, I've managed to develop without golfing
• Not six months after my last PC build, I've gotten the bug again and decided to mix-and-match parts from my two previous PC towers into a svelte 19L case

As someone whose trigger finger is glued to Amazon's "Buy Now" button, I'm awful to buy gifts for. My brother managed to surprise me, though, with this exploded OG Game Boy. I was excited to add it to my collection of framed hardware teardowns—which up until that point had only included GRID's OG iPhone shadow box:

Now, as for Internet stuff, here's some of what's been posted to the ol' website:

• Wrote Brace for the Fuckening about how screwed we'll be if the AI bubble doesn't burst. The Dow plunged 800 points a few days later. Really makes you think
• Iterated on prove_it and scrapple, which—in combination with Xcode MCP—have dramatically improved the quality of iOS apps that Claude Code can create
• Released another new "agentic engineering" tool called turbocommit, which saves state after every Claude Code turn. This has enabled me to more confidently juggle multiple agents in a single branch
• Recorded v51 and v52 of the podcast. If you're in the mood for one of my longform essays, just open Breaking Change in Apple Podcasts and read the transcript
• Figured out that the reason half the videos I take with iPhone Air lack any perceptible audio is that the microphone is where my pinky naturally rests. Neat
• Found what is very probably the best sushi from a non-Japanese owned restaurant I've ever had—and it's right around the corner!
• Received some tough feedback: now that coding agents can crank out hundreds of iterations in the time it used to take to push out a single release, the result is "antisocial" code with more bespoke, less hospitable implementations. Yet another sign that human-to-human collaboration is under threat

And that was February, I guess. How'd you make out?

As I mentioned last month, I spent most of January in Japan, preparing the way for our new condo. It was only once I got in a car and started driving outside the city center that I realized just how omnipresent Mount Fuji is when you live in Shizuoka.

Case in point: here's me, just hanging out for a suspiciously long time in a parking lot:

Stuff I got up to in January:

• Ate a shitload of good food in Shizuoka. Japan is home to many culinary delights, but its winter cuisine is perhaps my favorite (still not worth enduring the cold, however)
• Wrote about Weekstart, where Becky and I flip "working for the weekend" on its head. The goal is to compress all the stuff you hate doing into Monday and Tuesday, then reclaim your agency for the other five days of the week (it's not a coincidence I finally thought to write this on a Wednesday morning!)
• Bought a piece of art and hung it on my wall like a cultured adult human. For years, I had a rule: no Disney merch and no decorations on walls. Why the change? My talented friend Eric painted it
• Recorded two podcasts: v49 before the trip and v50 just after. I'm trying not to think about what kind of recording gear we'll want in the new place—every time I check Amazon, each component doubles in price
• Switched back to Anthropic's Claude Code from OpenAI's Codex CLI and was immediately cured of any FOMO I'd been suffering. Claude Code is the more powerful development tool, but its out-of-the-box engineering practices are undoubtedly worse
• Spent most of the last two weeks reckoning with the above realization by beating Claude into submission with a library I call prove_it, which kicks Claude in the shins every time it writes untested code. It also dispatches other agents to do cursory quality reviews so I don't have to. I can tell it's working, because I've gradually shifted from seeing Claude as an unruly subordinate to a sometimes-forgetful peer
• Opted to build a custom PDF-to-website pipeline because—in this weird agentic era—it would have taken more time to click through a couple dozen documents manually. We're truly living in some kind of golden era of computing
• Pre-ordered the Clicks Power Keyboard within a week of pre-ordering the Pebble Index 01—apparently, I'm an easy mark for ambitious sub-$100 gadgets. If nothing else, the keyboard may come in handy for Vision Pro and Steam Frame
• Jerod Santo of The Changelog joined the POSSE Party, and has since started blogging more frequently—I enjoyed his follow-up on the Great Shovelware Mystery of 2025
• Negotiated a partial refund with Wayfair's LLM chatbot, from $58.30 up to $97.17. What a time to be alive

A few questions I'd love your answer to:

1. Am I the only one still having issues with the AirPods Pro 3 whistling when you hold them and cutting out whenever a microwave turns on?
2. Anyone upgrade their AirTags yet? I normally buy every Apple product at launch, but I'm not feeling the same compulsion to get these—and not because Apple downgraded their stalking capabilities
3. As an unemployed man-of-leisure, I'm becoming increasingly disconnected from the job market and would love to hear what you're experiencing firsthand—is your workplace becoming agentrified? Do the graybeards have more sway than ever?

Lastly, if you're a programmer, and you follow my work but don't get what all this AI coding agent fuss is about, it might be worth treating it as a skill you have to fully commit to learning for a few weeks. As the late great Jim Weirich used to tell me: until you've used a tool in anger, you don't really know it.

As promised last month, this issue is just oyster meat. It's a new year and as good a time as any to hit reset and get this monthly newsletter back on its preordained beginning-of-the-month-ish delivery cadence. That makes this a quick turnaround after our last issue, so there's not much new to report. Good thing I asked you all to lower your expectations!

Let's see, since we last corresponded:

• Mike McQuaid wrote that he's joined the POSSE Party, so I pulled a quote and recruited him to help deal with maintenance and triage. Another early adopter posted an architectural review of my codebase to Reddit
• I spent a few afternoons tweaking a ChatGPT-powered Shortcut for Japanese study and was impressed to find Shortcuts is sneakily more functional than one might assume. Its new Use Model action allows users to tap into cloud-based Private Cloud Compute and ChatGPT for free, which is a total game changer. Native app developers can only access on-device models, which makes Shortcuts a uniquely powerful tool in its own right
• Aaron & I kept the streak alive by executing the 2nd Annual Punsort algorithm. I think his puns got less terrible or I got better at ranking them—either way, things seemed far less contentious than in our first go-round
• I did all four Disney parks in one day and live-wisped the ordeal over 12 hours, 16 rides, and 30,000 steps. If you missed my photos and videos, you'll just have to get in the habit of checking my homepage or Instagram every day, I guess! I got a couple remorseful emails from people looking to find my auto-deleting wisps/stories after they were, in fact, deleted. 💨
• Becky gave me a Steam gift card for Christmas, and this humorous trailer immediately sold me on Ball x Pit. I've since played it and can confirm it to be a Good Game: part Vampire Survivors, part Plants vs. Zombies, part Breakout.
• A few assorted takes:
  • If you or a loved one are worried about losing your job to AI, this essay is what I've been pointing people to lately
  • Macs have FileVault encryption enabled by default, which has always diminished their utility as home servers—if the power goes out, there goes your remote login access! They finally addressed this in macOS 26 Tahoe: inbound SSH connections following a cold boot will now unlock and finish booting my FileVault-protected Mac Studio
  • What populist candidates promise and what they prioritize once elected are rarely in agreement. So it goes in Japan, as an anti-foreigner platform gives way to a policy agenda that will attract more foreigners by further weakening the yen
  • If you're running modern Apple hardware, I recently learned there's a setting to make sure Safari actually renders content at a "ProMotion" 120Hz refresh rate

For the second year in a row, us kids paid a visit to dad's second-favorite spot in Walt Disney World on Christmas Day:

Fortunately, gallows humor has always played in the Searls family.

Stay tuned for next month's note, as I'll have just gotten back from the storied land of Shizuoka following the next chapter of our condo purchase journey. We're still on track to close in July, but in mid-January I have the not-technically-mandatory opportunity to pick out the curtains and the drapes at a sort of mini trade show event held by the developer. Well, curtains, yes, but also air conditioners. And tile. And how to finish the balcony. And how many mirrors we want, and where, and whether to tint them in sepia tones. And which LED mood lighting package should line the toilet. Should I pay for them to seal a brand new Japanese wood floor or is that a scammy upsell?

Reply and tell me what to do, please—the decision overload is truly overwhelming.

Anyway, the next week of my life is going to be spent poring over a dozen product catalogs. Bridging the language and cultural divide is extremely slow going. It's a good thing I failed to predict how much work this condo would turn out to be, or I'd never have gone through it. If you catch me having any fun this month, yell at me and tell me to get back to work.

Speaking of bridging language and culture, keep reading for one more stupid thing.

And then what happened?…

Hey everybody, we've almost survived another year! Just ten days to go—I hope we all make it!

Looking back on the home stretch of 2025, this is all I have to report since our last issue:

• I built a sexy new gaming PC over 3 days, 120 teeny-tiny M3 screws, and at least ten cups of coffee
• I got my first nose job. I've always had a huge fucking nose, and I'm relieved to finally be able to breathe out of it
• I talked about both of the above on my podcast
• I'm so sick of bracing for the AI bubble to pop, that I've decided to look forward to it instead. Buy popcorn futures, everyone 🍿
• I released POSSE Party, which I'll talk a bit more about later. Also these bits:
  • I spent a couple days documenting the hell that is other people's API keys.
  • I recorded a tutorial video in 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute variations. It's a Choose-your-own-attention-span adventure.
  • The first stop on my promotional tour was Aaron's livestream for a tour of the codebase, which you can peruse on GitHub

The day of my surgery, Becky insisted on taking a picture of me after I was told to put on a hairnet but before the drugs kicked in. I was very anxious going into the operation and she was very supportive throughout.

As 2025 winds down, the Searls of Wisdom LT (which stands for "Leadership Team", an acronym I'll be using from now on to amortize the time it took to write this parenthetical) has decided to evolve how it approaches our monthly newsletter operations. Change is hard for many of us, so in lieu of a normal essay about how my feelings inspired certain thoughts that led to valuable insights, I'm just going to explain what you can expect from this newsletter going forward before wishing you better luck next year and sending you on your way.

Merry Divestmas

Some time in June, my brother called me from the U.S. while I was riding a Shinkansen bullet train, at which point I realized I'd never actually taken a call while moving faster than 150 mph before. I remember a certain unease—unsure what the proper etiquette was—so I stepped into the hall between train cars to take it.

And then what happened?…

Hello! We're all busy, so I'm going to try my hand at writing less this time. Glance over at your scrollbar now to see how I did. Since we last corresponded:

• Dropped in on the Ruby AI podcast
• Added a new cable to the increasing number of cables plugging my face into my computer, which shipped with some pretty glaring issues, some of which I talked about
• Found somebody else saying that, in the short term, AI codegen is going to dramatically increase the demand for software as the supply constraint on programming eases
• Made an open source library called Straight-to-Video that performs client-side remuxing and transcoding of videos, beating them into shape for upload via the Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok APIs
• Hosted my brother after he sold his house, which (of course) coincided with nonstop power and Internet outages. Rather than do something about it, I complained into my microphone
• Mourned the fact iPhone 18 Air apparently got cancelled or delayed to Spring 2027, continuing my losing streak of falling in love with Apple's least popular hardware
• Learned I have huge fucking turbinates, even relative to my already huge fucking head

My good friend Ken took me to the Magic game last night some number of nights ago. It was a great game because we were losing very badly, and then it became very close, and then, right at the end—we won! The classic comeback narrative arc was fulfilled. Sports!

I was reflecting on life the other day, which is a thing I do more often now that I'm firmly in Phase 3 of my evil plan to ride off into the sunset and gradually be forgotten by all of you.

My original plan for this essay would have pulled at the common thread that ties things like game design, derivatives trading, reality shows, and sports betting together. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, it was taking me too long, and I'm now running out of time in November to give you a recap on what happened in October.

(By the way, don't be surprised if I just send you all a postcard for the December issue. I'm still new at running a monthly newsletter, and I'd prefer not to find out what happens when I fall more than a month behind. Feel free to demand a refund by replying to this message.)

So, anyway, like I said, my actual essay fell apart. Instead, I'm going to share a personal example of how a series of consequential decisions can paradoxically be both productive & rational, while simultaneously being costly & misguided.

I'd do it all again

It all started with one stray piece of unsolicited feedback.

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

It's me, your friend Justin, coming at you with my takes on September, which are arriving so late in October that I'm already thinking about November. To keep things simple, I'll just try to focus on the present moment for once.

Below is what I apparently put out this month. I'm sure I did other shit too, but none of it had permalinks:

• Added Tot to my (very) short list of apps I use every day, finding it helps me manage the ephemeral text needed to juggle multiple coding agents
• Cut only one major release of the podcast, but did apply two Hotfixes with José Valim and Mike McQuaid
• Iterated on how I work with coding agents. At this point, it is extremely rare for me to write code by hand
• Coaxed said AI agents into building me a tool that automatically adds chapters to a podcast based on the presence of stereo jingles, which I thought was a clever idea (brew install searlsco/tap/autochapter)
• Created a GitHub badge to disclose/celebrate software projects that are predominantly AI-generated shovelware
• Marked one year since "exiting" the Ruby community by giving my last conference talk, then proceeded to entangle myself all over again
• Bought the iPhone Air because I thought I'd love it. Now that I've had it a month, I'm pleased to report it's exactly what I wanted—probably the happiest I've been with a phone since the iPhone 12 Mini

By the way, if you've heard things that make you wonder why anyone would want the iPhone Air (e.g., it looks fragile, it's slower, it only has one camera, it gets worse battery life), this picture was all I needed to stop caring about any of that:

I lift weights, so I know I am literally capable of holding a half-pound phone all day, but I personally just couldn't abide the heft of the iPhone 17 Pro. Carrying it feels like a chore.

To be honest, over the last month I mostly stuck to my knitting and kept my head down trying to get POSSE Party over the line. The experience has been a textbook case of how a piece of software can be 100% "done" and "working" when designed for one's own personal use, but the minute you decide to invite other people to use it, the number of edge cases it needs to cover increases tenfold. Not enjoying it.

Another reason this newsletter is arriving late is that for two days I completely lost myself in OpenAI's video-generation app, Sora. It's very impressive and terrifying! I posted some examples of my "work", much to the confusion of both my hairstylist and Whatever God You Pray To. I also wrote some thoughts on what tools like Sora might mean for the future of visual storytelling, if you're interested.

Interestingly, Sora is designed as a social media app. Its obvious resemblance to Instagram and TikTok is striking. As someone who banished social networking apps from my devices years ago, I (and my wife/accountability partner) was immediately concerned that I was so sucked in by it. But where those platforms addict users into endless passive consumption of content and advertising, Sora's "SlopTok" feed couldn't be less interesting. After you sign up, create your avatar, and follow your friends, it's all about creating your own videos. There is functionally no reason for anyone to visit their feed. Whatever appeal other people's videos might have is dwarfed by the revolutionary creative potential of typing a sentence and seeing your blockbuster movie idea come to life, with you and your friends playing the starring roles.

I guess that explains why I spent so much time thinking about AI and its relationship to creative expression this month. I manually typed that just now, by the way. And an hour ago, I was waffling over whether to manually or generatively(?) fix a bug on my blog. And now I'm typing this sentence right after command-tabbing back into my editor because the realization that everybody is always in the "starring role" on Sora gave me the idea to generate a series of videos where my avatar merely lurks in the background. It is creepy as hell and fantastic.

That distracted impulse to go make a 10-second movie mid-paragraph raises a question: why do I so thoughtlessly reach for AI to generate videos, but agonize over whether to use it to write code? And what does it say that I categorically refuse to let LLMs write these essays?

Greetings, because that is today's topic.

The Generative Creativity Spectrum

Add creativity to the long list of things I've had to fundamentally rethink since the introduction of generative AI. Up until that singular moment when Stable Diffusion and GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT transformed how people create images, code, and prose, I held a rather unsophisticated view of what it meant to be creative. If you'd asked me in 2021 to distill the nature of creativity, I would have given you a boolean matrix of medium vs. intent. I'd probably hammer out three bullets like these:

You'll never guess what happens next…

Hope you're having a lovely September so far. Hard to believe it's almost Fall! Always love seeing the first signs of the end of Summer—I refer, of course, to Apple's annual iPhone event.

In case you don't subscribe to my every waking moment, some highlights of stuff I put out over the last month:

• Shared some of what I've learned about using Apple's on-device LLM API
• Suggested a new Star Wars watch order
• Opined about why I wasn't cut out for management
• Recorded two normal podcasts (v42 and v43) as well as an interview with Scott Werner
• Repeated my tireless appeal to get folks blogging again
• Gave up on Claude Code (which Anthropic has now admitted they made dumber for over a month) in favor of OpenAI Codex—specifically, this fork
• Published a command-line tool called imsg for exporting iMessage archives
• From that, I documented a how-to guide on distributing scripts via homebrew
• Did an hour-long review and buyer's guide of the aforementioned iPhone event (pre-orders go up Friday morning at 8 AM Eastern!)

Every month, I scroll through the last month of photos for one to include in this newsletter. Not many pictures this month, so here's a little surprise Becky left me that showed up in our iCloud Shared Photo Library

I feel personally attacked. And thirsty.

Today, I'm writing you about my favorite topic: capitalism. Or, more specifically, I'm here to shed a little light on a few "special" kinds of people who tend to be highly-valued in the economy but who are often portrayed as stereotypical caricatures. Each is as stubbornly human as the rest of us. Each possess an unusual blend of attributes that make them well-suited for the current epoch. My consulting career brought me face-to-face with more than my fair share of these people. The experiences I reflected back on while writing this were sometimes interesting, sometimes impressive, and rarely both.

What happens next will shock you…

I just realized that Christmas in July must have been held somewhere, and I missed it. Damn.

Regardless, the blog was busy since we last checked in:

• There's some Xcode stuff for Apple people, as well as the nostalgia of finding the order confirmation of my very first Mac, a 12" iBook G4
• We got in some good thoughtlording with a software design thinkpiece, an organizational design thinkpiece, and an AI thinkpiece
• Reflections on how bang-on my favorite apocalyptic short story set in 2026 turned out to be
• A couple podcasts, too (1, 2)

Also since I last wrote you, they held the final RailsConf, an event and community that had a huge impact on my career. I was honored that Aji Slater summarized my 2017 keynote on stage, even though I don't own a single pair of white pants:

As it happens, I've been chewing on a lot of the same themes I discussed back in that How to Program talk, because the current AI-induced industry shakeup we're experiencing has underscored the importance of taking ownership over how we work. And although I didn't plan this in advance, that's kind of exactly the topic I'm writing about today.

Of course, when I talk about work, I mean it in a quite expansive sense. For most intents and purposes, I retired at the end of 2023. I contend that I still do stuff, but increasingly nothing about my day resembles a traditional job. There is, however, one exception: I now have more meetings on my calendar as a retiree than I did as a full-time employee.

Today, I'll share the unlikely story of how my calendar started filling up again and the even unlikelier reality that I'm completely okay with it (happy, even).

Turns out, there's more to it…

Greetings everyone, and welcome to the middle of July in Orlando, where it's too damn hot outside and too damn cold inside. Thank you for joining our Q2 Performance Review of the Justin Business Unit at Searls LLC. Before I share status updates on this year's strategic initiatives and dig into how we're tracking against our KPI benchmarks, here are a few highlights regarding our output over the past month:

• The latest pre-release build of POSSE Party adds support for four new platform integrations, a 200% increase over the previous version
• I started a new interview series on called Hotfix on the Breaking Change feed, and its inaugural episode is getting rave reviews. When you factor in March's launch of Merge Commits, podcast series are up 300% compared to the year-ago quarter
• "Full-breadth Developers" generated tens of thousands of organic impressions in its first 24 hours of publication, marking the fastest growth of a buzzword-defining post in justin.searls.co history
• Speaking of the website, a new suite of automations has been implemented that add support for scheduling posts in the future, fetching social images for outbound links, normalizing typographical inconsistencies, and pissing off most of my followers by spewing an endless stream of my Japanese restaurant reviews

There were some bittersweet notes this month, as well. The Walt Disney Company decided to conclude its partnership with Searls LLC with the closure of Tom Sawyer Island, ending a 16-year tradition of my posing in front of the name "Tom" on this fence:

What's with all this corporate year-in-review stuff? Well, Becky's latest podcast prompted me to consider doing my own, "6 months down, 6 to go," retrospective on 2025. This is me leaning in.

The verdict is in, and I've decided to give myself a failing grade.

Let's dive in and find out…

Some number of nights spent in a hotel is the ideal number to ensure the perfect vacation. It is probably more than three nights. It is definitely less than 42. I didn't set out to uncover this fact, but I figured I might as well share this discovery with you: do not stay in hotels for 42 consecutive nights. At least not if you consider it a vacation.

So, why have I spent the last 42 nights in hotels?

Because I wanted to buy a condo as a second home, of course. And the condo was in Japan. And the… you know what, I'm going to stop myself. I've told portions of this story in a narrative form three times already, and I'm not convinced it provides a very compelling arc. "Affluent man of leisure overcomes problem after problem of his own creation in order to acquire a second home on another continent," is not exactly an epic retelling of The Hero's Journey. It's an interesting sentence, maybe, but I'm not sure it makes for a good story.

All I'll say is that this endeavor has been as weird as anything else I've set out to do. And despite being uniquely exhausting, it's already proven to be one of my life's most rewarding side quests. In addition to creating countless memories, this experience has also stress-tested my resolve, my intellect, and my waistline (since 42 nights has also meant 42 restaurants).

To illustrate just how long it's been, dinosaurs still roamed the earth when I got here:

So, without repeating the whole story for a fourth time and without anything else of interest to talk about, I will instead offer you a humble crash course in all of the Japanese vocabulary I have had to learn since I got this bright idea in April and Becky gave me the green light to pursue it.

What happens next will shock you…

Remember April? April was a month in a long line of months that left me (and, one presumes, a lot of people) asking themselves, "how did we end up here?" Well, that's what you have this weird newsletter for. And we'll get to that, I promise.

In terms of stuff I did since last time we chatted:

• Cut a couple (1, 2) good Breaking Change episodes. The content is questionable, but the audio quality has never been better
• Summarized what I consider to be the easiest-to-assess traits of strong programmers
• Started using GitHub Copilot in Agent mode, and recorded my vibe code deflowering live on YouTube
• Made Reddit angry by using a computer to generate background images for my house's rooms in HomeKit

I also started a vlog. Right now it just lives in this album in my Photos library, but initial reviews are unanimously positive!

As I start writing this, I'm sitting on an A350 bound for Tokyo, and the flight attendant just announced we won't have WiFi over the Pacific, because Viasat or whoever hasn't launched their latest satellite yet. As a writer and programmer whose greatest impediment to creative output is the risk of distracting myself on the Internet, learning that I would be forced offline for 13 hours triggered a familiar relief. My body softened. Maybe I'll actually get some sleep. If I play my cards right, I might manage to write one whole e-mail between now and when I land. [Update, 19 days later: I did not.] In any case, being kicked off the 'Net for a few hours once in a while can be restorative.

In fact, as luck would have it, one answer to the question posed at the outset ("how did we end up here?") is also, more or less, "because Internet." So today, let's talk a bit about the World Wide Web and how tangled in it we've become.

You'll never guess what happens next…

Hey everyone, remember March? It was 10 days ago now. And so far April is making me long for the good ol' days of two weeks ago, despite March itself having been one of the more turbulent months in recent memory.

I'm going to take a breath and try to recount some March stuff:

• I made my and Aaron's TLDR gem an actually viable (dare I say, nice) testing framework for Ruby, declaring it 1.0 in the process (if you're not a programmer, did you know you can declare any software "1.0" for any reason or no reason at all? As with everything, nothing means anything.)
• I launched a new podcast called Merge Commits and dropped 36 episodes all at once, in response to a survey where respondents agreed I wasn't producing nearly enough content
• I committed myself to launching POSSE Party by the end of the year, then proceeded to spend the whole month doing anything other than work on it
• I figured out how to let my computer drive itself, but it was really bad at it, so I stopped
• I couldn't shut up about how much I was enjoying the game Avowed, and discussed it at length on my real podcast
• We got to see Tina Fey & Amy Poehler live and up close with our old friend Nicole and her husband (and our new friend) Nathan and that was a lot of fun. Nicole and Nathan combine to form a spiffy creative studio, who you should hire to create you things

Oh yeah, I also wasted several cumulative hours of my life staring mindlessly as OpenAI's new 4o image generation slowly poured vaseline all over my face and hair:

Of all these things, what inspired me to write to you today was, oddly enough, the videogame. See, what sets Avowed apart is the remarkable restraint Obsidian Entertainment showed by embracing an intentionally finite design. Avowed exists in an open world, but it is not an "open-world game", certainly not of the sort typified by the game it was destined/doomed to be compared to: Skyrim. (Itself produced by Obsidian's spiritual second cousin, Bethesda Game Studios.) Where Skyrim encourages you to explore its continent however you like, Avowed leads you along a particular path. In Skyrim, leveling up causes your enemies scale up in strength along with you, whereas Avowed's enemies are static—they'll smoke you if you're not ready for them, but you'll obliterate all who stand against you if you take the time to grind some XP first. And while countless gamers have played literal thousands of hours of Skyrim over thirteen years, you would have to carefully sip everything Avowed offers to reach even one hundred hours. When you reach the end of Avowed, that's it. Game over.

In 2011, a horizon-broadening game like Skyrim was what we needed. In 2025, a straightforward and focused game like Avowed is what the moment calls for.

Just one question: Why?

To be continued…

Congratulations on beating Level 2 of 2025. Can't wait to see what March has in store for us. A couple new initiatives to share from Searls Industries this month:

• Becky started a podcast in conjunction with her Better with Becky enterprise, where she sells monthly strength-training programs via a curiously-slick web application
• I announced POSSE Party, my first solo product. It will launch later this year, and its goal is to help people escape the post-Twitter diaspora by cross-posting your content to your social accounts on your behalf

Yesterday, I returned from Vegas after attending Test Double's annual retreat and quarterly board meeting. I'm coming to grips with a couple things. First, that I'm entirely okay never going back to Vegas. And second, that I'm entirely okay never going back to who I was the last time I needed a Vegas trip to escape my life.

Speaking of Vegas, I couldn't find a single picture from the trip, so let's all pretend this shot with my longtime colleague and collaborator Dave Mosher wasn't taken at Disney World a week prior:

On a personal note, I've changed in some pretty fundamental ways over the past 18 months, and—in case you've noticed how my character arc is distressingly similar to a bunch of other tech villains—I figured I'd explore my transformation in today's note. Yes, I moved to Florida. Yes, I started caring less how my words make people feel. Yes, I'm prioritizing my own wants and needs over those of others.

In short, I've learned to embrace my inner asshole. And I'm frustrated to report that it's totally backfired. Instead, I'm somehow a kinder, more generous, and all-around better person today than the whole last ten years I spent trying to be good.

The birth and death of @searls

Growing up, I had a keen intuitive sense that living for the approval of others would be stifling and counter-productive. More than most, I desperately yearned for acceptance and validation—the corrosive impact of which I was forced to reckon with at a very young age. In second or third grade, I remember playing H-O-R-S-E at my friend John's house and, as he passed me the ball, he asked why I cared so much what others thought about me. I didn't know the answer.

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

It's taken me a while to figure out what to write for you that would tie a bow around January 2025. My take on the cultural and political realignment we seem to be experiencing? A deep dive into the video workflows I've been developing as an outgrowth of my Breaking Change podcast? Reflections on the distinct misery of feeling like one's life has regressed in some way, and the counter-productive ways American men react to the sensation of going backwards?

None of those felt quite right.

So I sat on the newsletter and waited for inspiration to strike. Then, out of nowhere, an unextraordinary patch for a developer tool I don't use got merged and—through a convoluted series of coincidences—will likely stand as one of the biggest accomplishments of my life.

I'll explain what I mean by that, but first, here's a picture of my brother and me at brunch in a boat-themed restaurant literally named Boathouse and seated at a table built into an actual fucking boat:

What this patch has to do with me

If you're not a programmer, fear not: I don't intend to get too lost in the technical weeds here. That said, some amount of exposition is necessary to convey why the aforementioned pull request matters.

Okay, I'm interested…

Welp, we're finally done with 2024.

It was a busy year for Searls family of brands. A few highlights of what I'll remember this year for:

• Launching my first podcast, Breaking Change, and having an absolute blast doing it. Check out the latest episode, where Aaron "tenderlove" Patterson and I spend over two hours stack-ranking a year's worth of puns. (Also available in video!)
• Collaborating with Becky to help build her business's first software product, which I have been using myself as it offers a very good way to go about figuring out which weights to lift and when
• Retiring from conference speaking with one final talk (though I reserve the right to take another stab at public speaking in Japanese)
• Providing minor logistical (and literally no other) support for Jeremy as he continued to 3D print the change he wanted to see in the world, from theme park props to over-the-top character costumes

That said, give it a few decades and if 2024 ever comes up in conversation, the first thing to come to mind will almost certainly be December's passing of my father, Fred.

Rather than wandering around the house and cooking up one of my trademark insightful-but-totally-overwrought essays about life, I thought it'd be more appropriate to print the remarks I shared about Fred at his funeral. The pastor told me to keep it to 5-7 minutes. I did my best, but ultimately found it impossible compress his impact on me and the other people in his life within such a tight time constraint. (Says the guy with the 3-hour podcast, I know.)

The service's program called what follows a remembrance. Does that make it a eulogy? That word feels too strong, to be honest (I've been driving without a valid eulogy license for years). Anyway, here are the words I said.

Content warning: more content…

I found myself in need of a post-election palate cleanser, which is how Becky and I found ourselves spending most of November traveling Japan again. As always, I learned a lot. Like that the rhythm game Chunithm is probably too difficult for me to ever become good at. And that the Kawasaki Brave Thunders have a tremendously loyal fanbase. And that driving cross-country in Japan wasn't quite as nerve-wracking as my fears had made it out to be. (Though it's hardly cheap.)

Oh yeah, I also learned that every room's TV in the Toy Story Hotel is set in an Etch A Sketch frame:

As it happens, my grandfather was an executive at Ohio Art and played no small part in bringing the Etch A Sketch to market. He sadly died before I was old enough to ask him for that story, so all I have are bits and pieces I learned from my dad. It's too bad that so many people who've touched my life in such profound ways remain complete mysteries to me. Writing this newsletter is one of a dozen ways I strive to avoid the same fate.

To be honest, this is perhaps the most personal essay I've published so far, if not the most emotionally vulnerable. It's certainly the most detailed account of "who I am", in a certain sense. I have no idea what you'll think or feel after reading this. If you find that it speaks to you, I'd be lying if I were to say that was intentional. The primary audience of every story I tell about myself is myself. And there's never just one story. And those stories always change upon retelling.

Here goes.

Let's dive in and find out…

I will forever remember October 2024 as the month I managed to clear a year's worth of personal to-do items only to come out the other end asking, "what am I supposed to do with my life when I have nothing left to do?"

Big "dog who just caught the car" energy.

I like to use this newsletter as a way to experiment with different modes of writing. Playful stuff. Put an interesting spin on an old memory. Send a meaningful message by telling a story. Write some jokes. So let's see what we have here…

Looks like you get a stream-of-consciousness essay on the challenges facing software developers in the current job market and ideas for what to do about it based on conversations I've had with various tech leaders. Weird, but here we are. I don't make the rules, I just type out what the voices tell me to.

Before we dive in, I'll take a moment to plug my podcast, Breaking Change, which I feel like is really hitting its stride when it comes to format, content, and audio quality. The best part is that because nothing I say matters, it's like one of those sightseeing buses you can hop on and hop off at any time. Listen here and there. Finish an episode or don't. Write in questions and comments and you'll keep getting free access to more episodes. I've had folks write in to say they take copious notes as they listen and one person who claims to use my semi-dulcet tones as a sleep aid for their newborn. I'm sure the podcast has other uses too, but those are two of them, apparently.

And then what happened?…

Hey everyone, have a good September?

Apologies, as most of my top-of-mind thoughts are hurricane-adjacent as I write this:

• That we decided to escape the storm by driving from Orlando to Savannah on Wednesday morning
• That I spent Wednesday night tossing and turning in bed after Milton made landfall, wondering whether I'd be more upset if there was significant damage to the house (and with it, the hassle of months of insurance claims and repairs) or if there was zero impact at all (rendering my 10 hours in the car an unnecessary hedge)
• That, in college, I rented a house on Milton Street we all called "The Milton", and how disappointed I am that none of Orlando's local news affiliates thought to call me to discuss this fascinating human interest story
• That our house is absolutely fine. Didn't even lose power. And my predominant emotional reaction is, predictably, to feel like the drive was a waste of time

Anyway, that's October stuff. And I'm not here to talk about October stuff, because Searls of Wisdom is a publication that happens in arrears. It takes a full month for these insights to coalesce and maturate in the nacre of my self-indulged mind.

So, let's talk about September stuff.

The one thing I'll remember about September 2024 is that it was the month I gave my final conference presentation. After 15 years of speaking at user groups and software conferences, I've decided to hang up the presenter remote. End of an era.

Here's a pic of me and my friends Aaron and Eileen at the RailsConf: World Edition afterparty:

It's been strange developing so many impactful friendships over dozens of seasonal pseudo-vacations sprinkled sporadically throughout my adult life. I've rarely ever visited these friends where they live, or met their families, or seen how they operate outside the predictable plot beats of a conference event. Each relationship a vignette of awkward run-ins at baggage claim and hotel lobbies. Strained catch-ups at noisy speaker dinners and sponsor parties. Warm greetings crossing paths in convention center hallways. Hushed critiques shared from the back of other people's sessions.

I can happily live without attending another conference. But will that mean living without most of these friendships, too?

Yeah, probably.

Below, I'm going to discuss my decision to announce my retirement from public speaking, how people reacted to it, and what the resulting dissonance can tell us about weighing loss aversion against opportunity cost.

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

By reading this you have demonstrated two things: you have at least a passing interest in hearing from me and you know how to subscribe to a thing. That being the case, you might also enjoy subscribing to my podcast, Breaking Change. Right around 20 episodes, and it's settling into a biweekly format that reminds me of the drive time radio talk shows I listened to as a kid to pass the time. If you're interested in the kinds of things that surround me—independent software development, theme parks, Japan, tech news, games and movies, and hypercritical observations about everyday life—you might like it. You also definitely might not like it. No way to know until you try.

Spoiler alert: there's more to this…

Last month I talked about the power of pressuring yourself instead of letting the world do it for you. This month, I can report that I followed my own advice and managed to get a metric shitton of work done on the app I'm building. Sure, I fell behind on other goals, I only left the house a handful of times, my to-do list has become a stress-inducing mess, and I can't say I had much fun. And I'll admit, there were times I questioned what the hell I was doing with my life. But think of the productivity! I successfully stimulated my work ethic gland and I hustled hard.

Maybe a little too hard. This was the least blurry of all three pictures taken of me this month:

Turns out, there's more to it…