Over the last 20 years, my time in Japan felt like Season 1 of Pluribus. A nation acting in harmony, going from happy to see me everywhere I went to constantly signaling they "need some space"

In cities, it's thanks to over-tourism. In the country, it's anti-immigrant populism.

Tooling for coding agents is overly focused on scaling numerous parallel workers instead of ensuring correctness. That continues to be where all my time goes and is the real barrier to scaling up. (e.g., Why am I exploratory testing this UI when vision models could be doing it?)

This Opus 4.5 failure mode rarely happens with Codex: Claude copy-pasted a source listing by mistake, edited that instead of the correct file, declared success. When I pointed out its error, it confidently asserted: "The code is correct - this is a browser caching issue." 🖕

After hearing lots of Opus 4.5 hype, I decided to switch to Claude Code this month from Codex CLI (with which I have a separate set of frustrations), and I've learned two things:

1. Claude Code is significantly more productive (parallel by default) and generally smarter (smarter coding) than it was in August

2. When literally anything goes wrong, it routinely takes the path of least resistance (making excuses, declaring victory when things don't work, reaching for workarounds when basic reason points elsewhere)

Disappointed overall. Both GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 (and their CLI's surrounding chrome) feel barely improved since last summer.

Look on the bright side, Apple chose not to ruin Aperture's icon last week. ikennd.ac/blog/2026/01/old-man-yells-at-modern-software-design/

Given that it's just as often programmers who have no clue what to build with the coding capacity offered by AI agents, I WOULD say the issue is that many people are horribly uncreative. simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/24/jasmine-sun/

Twenty years working on Windows command line tools? Glad the dude is retiring but I'm sure he's a shell of his former self. tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/23/1915259/powershell-architect-retires-after-decades-at-the-prompt

I played Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo so you don't have to tell me that it's strawberry season in Japan in January

Over the last year, every SaaS app launch has been followed by a competing vibe-coded clone app within days or weeks. Time to update the Silicon Valley shitheel lexicon:

TIRED: "Fast follow"
WIRED: "Sloppy seconds"