I'm still iterating on my experimental Claude Code verification harness, prove_it. This week my focus has been on nudging agents to practice test-driven development. Traditionally, we called this "TDD", but which has recently been renamed to "red-green TDD" as it has been discovered that this is what LLMs interpret as "real TDD".

Anyway, so that I could watch it steer an agent in a fresh codebase in real time, I opened a new directory and asked Claude Code to one-shot a terminal-based tennis game, replete with scoring and an AI that I couldn't beat. In OCaml. And it worked! It actually test-drove everything. Neat!

We ordered a wood chest that arrived with cosmetic damage. After logging the damage in their customer support interface, it prompted me to start a chat with their AI virtual assistant.

What happened next:

1. It immediately offered me a 15% refund to keep the product
2. I asked for 20% and it immediately agreed
3. I asked for 25% and it immediately agreed
4. I asked for 30% and it turned me down
5. I took the 25%, which was, indeed, immediately refunded

Turns out that negotiating with a rules engine is way easier than negotiating with a human tasked with operating a rules engine.

So basically, all Wayfair did was add a chatbot to the end of their existing "Report a Problem" interface that will give customers more money if they ask for more money. What a world. 🌍

My friend Eric Doggett became a Disney Fine Artist a couple years back and he's currently being featured at EPCOT's 2026 Festival of the Arts. Each day this week, he's holding court to talk to people about his work at a pop-up gallery just outside the Mexico Pavilion. Myself and a few other friends ganged up on him this afternoon to lend our moral and financial support by showing up and buying a few pieces.

I really like the painting I picked up. It's a semi-subtle ode to Big Thunder Mountain, a celebration of Walt's love of trains, a not-so-hidden Mickey-shaped rockface, and a tiny nod to the goat.

If you're a local, swing by and say hi to Eric—he's great! If you're not, check him out as @EricDoggett on YouTube—the videos of how he works are pretty cool. I immediately hung it in my office / studio when I got home, because Eric's audio engineering talents are a big reason why Breaking Change sounds as good as it does!

For however expensive LLM inference supposedly is, OpenAI continues to be stupidly stingy with respect to web searches—even though any GPT 5.2 Auto request (the default) is extremely likely to be wrong unless the user intervenes by enabling web search.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT's user interface offers:

• No way to enable search by default
• No keyboard shortcut to enable search
• No app (@) or slash (/) command to trigger search
• Ignores personalization instructions like "ALWAYS USE WEB SEARCH"
• Frequently hides web search behind multiple clicks and taps, and aggressively A/B tests interface changes that clearly will result in fewer searches being executed

All of this raises the question: how does ChatGPT implement search? What is the cost of the search itself and the extent of chain-of-thought reasoning needed to aggregate and discern the extraordinary number of tokens that need to be ingested by those search results?

It's interesting that OpenAI is so eager to goose usage by lighting dumpsters full of venture capital on fire, but is so stingy when it comes to ensuring their flagship product knows basic facts like "iPhone Air is a product that exists."

The Globe key on macOS is a strange key.

Ostensibly, Apple added it so users could easily change keyboard layouts to switch between different languages. In practice, however, the vast majority of users only need two "languages": their mother tongue and the emoji keyboard. The same key also serves as an underutilized fn button—a role that has become ubiquitous on Windows and Linux keyboards, but which has seen relatively little use on macOS.

By having two jobs, the Globe key ends up being bad at both. And when it comes to changing languages, it fails because it introduces a 300–500 ms delay while the system waits to see whether the user intends to press and hold the key as part of another shortcut.

This is way too slow if you actually need to switch keyboard layouts rapidly. And nobody needs to do that more than Japanese users, for whom half-width English characters and full-width kana and kanji are routinely interspersed within a single sentence or web form. (This is why Japanese hardware keyboards have dedicated, instantly responsive keys on either side of the layout for switching between English characters and Japanese input modes in a single keystroke—without requiring the user to mentally track the current modal state of the keyboard.)

While I can't magically add another physical key to my U.S. keyboard, tools like Karabiner-Elements or Keyboard Maestro can take over the Globe key and make it switch layouts instantly.

Since I already have Keyboard Maestro running, that's what I used to fix this. You can download the macro here.

To set it up:

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard.
2. Set Press 🌐 key to to Do Nothing.
3. Double-click the macro to add it to Keyboard Maestro, and make sure it's enabled.

Once configured, you can switch between the two keyboard layouts instantly—without waiting for the operating system to catch up.

One of the many subtle frustrations I have with the Airpods Pro 3 is that the redesigned case actually results in a slightly-askew magnet alignment, which results in several (official!) MagSafe chargers failing to charge the case. Well, while the iPhone Air MagSafe Battery may not fit any other model iPhone particularly well, it's actually a super handy way to recharge your AirPods! Just plop the fucker on the back and twist until you hear that familiar ding and see the light turn on.

Might come in handy on a long flight.

Secondary PSA: engraving is free and AirPods are disposable: put your e-mail address on your AirPods.

Becky and I are wrapping up a rewatch of Mad Men this week, and throughout the first several seasons, she'd point out the artwork hanging near the entrance of Peter Campbell's apartment, a screenshot of which I shall now hotlink from Blogger's CDN like it's 1959:

(Of course, Pete Campbell is so classless that in my head canon, Trudy must have picked this out.)

Anyway, every time the giraffes would show up, Becky would snap her fingers and point at the TV like Leo in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood before commenting on how much she loved the piece. We are not art people, and I can take a hint, so I ordered a recreation made by this guy on Etsy and hid it in a closet for a few months before giving it to Becky to unwrap on Christmas.

Well, I finally got around to hanging them up last night, and they look pretty good! It helps that I had a huge blank wall framed by white trim and surrounded by mid-century modern furniture. I loved the little touch that Peter D. Campbell was written in huge lettering (larger than the artist's) across the center of the middle giraffe.

Classic Pete. What a prick.

Problem: I have hundreds of pages of PDF catalogs in Japanese and no great way to translate them while retaining visual anchors. I like how Safari's built-in translate tool handles images, but it doesn't support PDFs

Solution: point Codex CLI at the directory of PDFs, tell it to rasterize every page of every doc into high-resolution images, then throw together a local webapp to navigate documents and pages. Now I can toggle Safari's built-in translation wherever I want.

Result: I'm no longer worried the curtains won't match the drapes. 💁‍♂️

This is the golden age of custom software if you've got an ounce of creativity in your bones.

If you look closely, you'll spot that the Instagram algorithm has successfully identified my absolute number-one-with-a-bullet favorite topic. How on earth did it figure that out? My phone must be listening to me.

Who is this for? STEM majors realizing they're better off running Uber Eats?

I'm working on an inadvisably complex Apple Shortcuts widget for studying Japanese language, and just realized two things that may save you some time in the future:

1. If statements are expressions: the value of the "If Result" is available and evaluates to the final value of whatever branch was traveled at runtime
2. Repeat blocks may say "each" but actually double as map functions: they return a "Repeat Results" value, which evaluates to a List of the final value of each iteration

Because Shortcuts exposes such a gobsmackingly-frustrating UI for actually building programs, it's easy to assume that you're hobbled by the conventions of something like BASIC, but there are some surprisingly modern conveniences lying under the surface!

We were gone most of the day so I told Codex CLI to migrate Better with Becky to my searls-auth gem and to commit & push regularly to a PR so I could review remotely. Just noticed that it must have looked through the git history in order to write commit messages that match my own. Seriously thought I wrote half of these before I realized as much.

Uncanny, but appreciated.

I turned on Ring's new AI description feature for its cameras a couple weeks ago. Opened my event history for the first time since then and was kind of impressed by the honest assessment of what goes on around here.

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.

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.

What are the odds?*

*The odds are 1 in 1.7 million

Like many other Vision Pro sickos, I was far more excited about this week's announcement of a newly-updated Developer Strap than I was about last week's news of the M5 Vision Pro itself.

Why? The original strap allowed you to connect your Vision Pro to a Mac, but at unacceptably slow USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) speeds. This still achieved much lower latency connection than WiFi, but the image quality when running Mac Virtual Display over the USB connection was rendered far too blurry to be worthwhile. The new strap, however, offers a massively-upgraded 20 Gbps connection speed. I rushed to order one at the news, because, in theory, those speeds ought to offer the absolute best experience possible when using Vision Pro as an immersive Mac display.

While Apple's support documentation says both devices "support" connecting to the strap, what wasn't clear was whether the original hardware would be able to actually deliver the increased bandwidth.

Well, I'm happy to report after plugging in the new Developer Strap into my original Vision Pro, System Information indicates a 20 Gbps connection! Moreover, I can confirm Mac Virtual Display performs better than ever.

Seriously, I don't think I'll be able to go back. The increase in visual sharpness and the lightning-quick latency beat the pants off anything I've experienced, and I've been using Mac Virtual Display daily since the product's initial release. Up to now, others who've tried using Vision Pro for this purpose have reported that the display quality is poor—likely attributable to the need for a carefully-tuned WiFi environment to sustain the connection. That Apple finally offers a wired connection that delivers the definitive experience is a huge win.

If you own a Vision Pro and use it as a display for your Mac, you're already a dummy who blew $3500 on this thing—go spend $300 more and treat yourself to a massive upgrade.

A recruiter sent me this screenshot of some kind of GitHub profile scraper. Aside from naming me as a "top 1%" JavaScript developer (which I'm not sure is a compliment or a threat…), I just couldn't get over the "active on weekends" checkmark.

Lady, on weekends I charge double. 🤌

So here's a neat way to magically cut in half the time it takes to transfer to your new iPhone.

Back in 2019, I realized iPhone restores run much faster when the device is kept cold, because thermal throttling—not data transfer rate—is the real bottleneck. The thing is, a fridge isn't quite cold enough and a freezer was way too cold (phones don't work well at below zero temperatures, apparently). So the stopgap solution I initially arrived at was to sandwich the phone between a couple ice packs. Not only did it work great, I was tickled to see a few sites like Cult of Mac publish how-to guides on the technique.

Anyway, figuring out how to best cool my iPhones to expedite a direct transfer restore has become something of an annual tradition in the Searls household. This year, I had the foresight to buy small ice packs and then stick MagSafe-compatible receiver magnets onto them.

If you're interested, here's what you're looking at:

• Ice Packs
• Adhesive Magnets

Those are affiliate links, which I feel like I should disclose because this website definitely counts as a journalism.

The Verge is included in Apple News+, so if you're an Apple One subscriber (as I imagine, many Verge readers are), whenever you hit the paywall in your browser you can—at least from Safari's Share Sheet—very easily open the same article in the News app and avoid the paywall.