Why I love infrared saunas: weighing myself before and after a 60 minute session, I sweat so much that I dropped 1.3 pounds DESPITE drinking 1.68 liters (3.7 lb) of water.
That means in just one hour a 65°C sauna caused me to perspire 2.27 L (5 lb). Holy shit.
My productivity skyrocketed this week. Sleeping better? New AI tool? Nope!
I signed out of iMessage on my Mac. Night and day difference. My computer is for computing again. HUGE difference.
iOS lets you set a default app for 9 different categories, but of course Reminders is not among them. All I want is to be able to funnel everything into Things with minimal shenanigans support.apple.com/en-us/121430
Not gonna lie, zero regrets for having spent the weekend panic-buying just about every piece of electronics I need for the next year. reuters.com/technology/chinese-electronics-company-anker-starts-raising-prices-amazon-2025-04-11/
Sure, Nate's CEO hired Filipinos to "be the AI", but If investors had bothered to read the pitch deck, they'd have noticed he defined LLM as "Large Labor Model" techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/fintech-founder-charged-with-fraud-after-ai-shopping-app-found-to-be-powered-by-humans-in-the-philippines/
The reason AI startups like Windsurf, Cursor, et. al, are all fucked is that "you're a product, not a platform" is the new "you're a feature, not a product."
If you fail to secure a massive acquisition, you're gonna get steamrolled by the big tech companies as soon as they catch up.
tl;dr it works. You should try it.
I finally got around to trying the new Agent functionality in GitHub Copilot.
You gotta really know when to ask an LLM for help, though. (I wrote last year how I decide whether to reach for an AI assistant, if you're interested.)
My experience and recent research both indicate that AI works best for creating new stuff from scratch, especially when that code is perfunctory and typical and conventional. That's the reason there's such a divide between people who've had terrific experiences with "vibe coding" and others—like me—for whom all the hours fucking with AI to make it do my job for me have mostly been a waste of my time. Every other time I've tried to use an agent mode in Cursor or Claude Code, I've asked it how to do things that most "staff" or "principal" or "distinguished" engineer have never tried and would have no idea how to do, so naturally they never went well.
But today I'm finally starting work on a new gem, and I had an annoying task that wasn't a legacy rescue, or exploiting a brand new language feature, or doing something totally unlike anything anyone has ever done before. So I fired up the agent mode using Anthropic's 3.7-sonnet model and let it go to work.
Specifically, I asked it to stub out a Rails engine to use as a starting point for moving over existing login functionality into a gem. It did basically everything in the same order and way that I would. It commented out additional hooks I'll probably need, which is nice.
It also gave me instructions for wiring up the new engine from the project I'm extracting the behavior from, which is a nice bonus.
Did it work? Yup:
Cool.
It's a bad time to sell stocks, but it's the PERFECT time to sell my playstupid.games domain. Want it? E-mail me at wtf@searls.co
This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on April 9, 2025.
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:
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?
Good post for engineering leaders struggling to figure out how to make their business counterparts happy. Bonus: a rare 2x2 matrix that makes a meaningful point. testdouble.com/insights/beyond-mvp-why-your-most-valuable-tactic-matters
The latest episode of Breaking Change is the first that feels like it clicks as a video. Genuinely preferred watching it over simply listening for the first time youtube.com/watch?v=y6G5a_myb4M
Nothing like a peaceful Sunday morning at the end of an exhausting, historically-volatile week to pour a hot cup of coffee and spew absolutely scalding takes in all directions. If you get burned, don't say I didn't warn you. Read the message on the lid.
We've done 34 of these now and my mailbag is getting full of old e-mails that don't make sense anymore. Please email new stuff to me at podcast@searls.co and we, like civilization, will start fresh next time!
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
You can read more about things on other websites below:
TIRED: Panic-buying toilet paper
WIRED: Panic-buying cameras and SSDs
There's the headline. You know it's real when they pull out the pics of floor traders touching their faces. theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trump-tariffs-stock-market
The best test framework for Ruby finally became useful. TLDR 1.0 is here: github.com/tendersearls/tldr
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott apparently just said:
"95% of code is going to be AI-generated (in the next five years)," Scott said. But before developers start panicking, he reassured that "it doesn't mean that the AI is doing the software engineering job…. authorship is still going to be human."
Panic? Never been a better time to start a company focused on cleaning up bad code and aiding broken organizations and then billing by the hour.
Anyone who still believes the quantity of code one owns is an asset and not a liability is a fool.
In general, I love how Japanese society prioritizes cleanliness, but one thing that's never made sense to me is how the rice sold at supermarkets is absolutely FULL of germs.
My first "vibe-coded" program. Claude Desktop with MCP file server. Never touched an editor. Never read the source. Works. github.com/searls/icloud-dotfiles/blob/master/bin/code
Proud to say this post has aged like fine wine since I wrote it thirty years ago in 2024 justin.searls.co/posts/3-simple-rules-for-using-my-large-language-model/
Did Nintendo just reinvent split-screen multiplayer?
