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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.