Sam should simply ask ChatGPT how to make ChatGPT better techmeme.com/251201/p35
I spent my holiday weekend gaining massive respect for the small-form factor (SFF) PC gaming community. Holy shit, was this a pain in the ass. BUT, it's a fraction the size, way faster, and whisper quiet compared to my outgoing build. Glad I did it.
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This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on November 25, 2025.
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:
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.
It all started with one stray piece of unsolicited feedback.
Happy Thanksgiving. This is for you: posseparty.com/
Hate to be so blunt, but if you're a senior programmer and aren't succeeding with AI coding agents, you most likely failed to acquire the skill, intuition, and taste you should have been building all along. Your time is no longer worth $150 per hour. davegriffith.substack.com/p/software-development-in-the-time
How it goes. How it always goes.
Video of this episode is up on YouTube:
Had a little pep in my step this time. Maybe it's because I decided to start recording after 7 AM for once. Maybe it's because I can finally fucking breathe out of my nose holes.
Tell me about what you do while you continue to draw breath at podcast@searls.co.
Things you can read if you're bored:
Lately, I've been reminded of the heady days of my agile youth by how often I've found myself asking, "how will we test this?"
As I've mentioned frequently on podcasts and recent Q&As about AI, an odd paradox has emerged in the software industry:
In the late 2000s, I always knew I was talking to a solid programmer if their first question upon being handed a complex task was to ask, "how will we test this?" Agile developers learned back then that literally everything hinged on establishing a fast, reliable, automated way to verify your code fulfilled its intended purpose. Without tests, you can't refactor aggressively, deploy frequently, or delete safely. Over the 2010s, many of us learned patterns and heuristics that allowed us to take shortcuts and tone down our testing zeal in the name of pragmatism and efficiency, but the underlying skill of concocting ways to verify our code never stopped being valuable.
Well, here we are again. In 2025, the only thing that matters when it comes to coding agents like Claude Code and Codex CLI is to ensure they are equipped with the tools they need to independently verify the correctness of their work.
When half the websites I visited wouldn't load this morning, I figured I'd check downdetector to see if Cloudflare was down, but I couldn't. Because Cloudflare was down.
Distributed systems sound great, but the way the industry rushed to crown a handful of winners like AWS and Cloudflare had the net effect of merely increasing the number of single points of failure in the chain.
Breaking Change is a lot of things, but likely to be replaced by an AI podslop factory isn't one of them thewrap.com/ai-podcasts-hosts-inception-point-ai/
I've wanted to start listening to books for Japanese practice in addition to just reading them, but the lack of an easy way to quickly understand a particular word always limited my ability to understand and enjoy it.
With iOS 26, the Live Captions Accessibility feature can be set to a number of languages (including Japanese) and routed to the system audio instead of the microphone. So while Amazon would be happy to sell you a "Whisper" license for both audiobook and ebook in order to get a less useful version of this functionality, your iOS device can just passively be building a transcript of the book for you to review as you listen. There's even a "Copy Transcript" button in the top right corner of the expanded view!
This is a great example of leveraging advancements in OS-level AI features to accomplish language learning objectives that would have been a fantasy just a few years ago.
Fun little demo of this weekend's project. I recently shipped Becky a way to ship auto-expiring stories from Beckygram that would in turn syndicate to Instagram via POSSE Party, which was pretty straightforward since her site is an actual honest-to-god Rails app. But justin.searls.co is a static site with no backend component. I accomplished the same thing by creating a new media type for the blog called "wisps".
What you're looking at in this demo:
Extremely fun long weekend project, and would not have been possible without the acceleration of coding agents. In fact, Codex CLI wrote 100% of this code, which took me about 4 days and ~20 hours.
I've never been a fan of the story format because of the sick and twisted way it devolves into the "who watched my stories" meta by exposing so many metrics to users, but this way I don't have to engage with that to share shit. Hopefully this means I'll be able to better stay in touch with friends and loved ones when traveling and moving about. And if you, like me are not an Instagram person, now you have an excuse to visit my actual website from time to time!
Codex CLI and I invented a full client-side CMS for the blog using the GitHub and S3 APIs, then I wired up a new "wisp" media type to syndicate Instagram stories. See the top of justin.searls.co/
