I joined Twitter in 2007 and my brain slowly morphed over the next 15 years from hopelessly verbose to nihilistically pithy. I've kicked the Twitter habit, but the takes keep flowing. That's why I post them here and format them as a social network of one. You're welcome to bookmark any of these takes, though I'm not sure why you would.
By the way, the hearts and like counts are fake. They're just there to make you feel safe.
TIL the macOS Terminal app has a shortcut to open URLs. Mouse over the URL and hold command + double-click.
Been there for over 20 years. Damn.
Got a few more Sora invites. Email me justin at searls dot co if you want one and tell me what you'd make with it.
TFW your friend accidentally jailbreaks Sora to reveal your human verification recording blog.davemo.com/posts/2025-10-03-sora-bugs.html
Good post by Dave Mosher. It'd be great if leaders always provided the necessary clarity, but that's out of your control. Instead, equip yourself with the tools & mindset to gain alignment early rather than learn you actually had things wrong much later blog.davemo.com/posts/2025-10-01-brilliant-not-resilient.html
For anyone who wants to be deepfake buddies, here's my Sora profile. 🫠 sora.chatgpt.com/profile/searls
Without this post, it would require a conspiracy on the scale of a mass corporate takeover to explain Ruby Central's actions. In context, Occam's razor suggests a much smaller incident represented the last straw following a decade of unresolved conflict justin.searls.co/posts/why-im-not-rushing-to-take-sides-in-the-rubygems-fiasco/
Zach couldn't have asked for a better pull-quote from me for his new Calendearing product. calendearing.com/
Updated yesterday's post, adding a link to a contemporaneously-uploaded copy of the leaked Ruby Together board minutes that proposed charging for access to install RubyGems scribd.com/document/358730907/2016-12-01-Ruby-Together-2016-Board-Meeting-Agenda-and-Minutes
Timely reminder that the email address for questions you'd like me to answer on Breaking Change is podcast@searls.co
Proposal: move RubyGems (the gem and bundler CLI tools) to the same Ruby org that governs the language itself.
It's an accident of history that Ruby, its dependency tools, and its dependency hosting are managed by three separate entities. (And it hasn't gone great.)
The only difference between GPT-5 and GPT-5-codex is that the codex variant is capable of deleting code without leaving a comment like # removed code in its place.
One year ago today, I gave my final conference talk.
And, you know what? Wouldn't change a thing. justin.searls.co/tubes/2024-11-09-11h03m00s/
I keep thinking about the guy who dismissed coding agents by postulating there ought to be a flood of shovelware that hasn't materialized. A huge number of developers are still in denial these tools are useful. That's why I've started badging my agent-coded projects as Certified Shovelware, and you should too! justin.searls.co/shovelware/
So much for OpenAI running out of money by the end of the year. nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/openai-and-nvidia-announce-strategic-partnership-to-deploy-10gw-of-nvidia-systems
Use chatbots as tools, not friends. If you use ChatGPT or Claude, turn off memory and the ability to reference past chats. It only wastes context, assuming present-you wants what past-you wants.
Turned it off months ago and responses are way better. When you have memory enabled you effectively never one-shot anything. Every request is inherently multi-shot.
I now know three people who've decided to return iPhone 17 Pro and buy iPhone Air instead. Love to #influence people. justin.searls.co/posts/why-i-bought-the-iphone-air/
My coding agent started stopping to tell me to run the tests instead of running them itself. Kept happening. Got mad. Replaced my 800-word AGENTS.md with "I'm not your mom."
It started running the tests.
Generative AI is like the "Draw the Rest of the Owl" meme. Before, I'd draw two circles and give up. Now, I draw the two circles and it can get me something I can iterate on and ship.
The hard part shifts from drawing the owl to getting the two circles right—success depends on the quality of the foundation you lay for it.
For a real weird time, get yourself an MRI of your thumb.
Seeing a lot of Fractional CTOs and CFOs out there, but limiting your market to people who understand fractions is foolish. That's why I'm a Decimal CTO.