justin․searls․co

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.


Maybe it's because I got to see it in IMAX, but I really liked Christopher Nolan's Castaway reboot.

Casting Zendaya as Wilson was a bold choice, though.

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Biggest knock on Astra so far is that when I raise an issue during a long-running task, it will acknowledge my concern and then stop all work. Then I put the Tim Cook anecdote with "then why are you still here?" in my AGENTS.md and that seems to have fixed it.

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First Astra impressions: it's like Fable, but faster.

If you value your time, I can't see why you'd drive a coding agent with anything less than a Fable/Astra model. They produce so much less rework.

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Asked Codex and Claude Code to each try their hand at a tricky Core Text layout issue for Japanese vertical writing:

GPT 5.6 Sol xHigh: 1,581,445 tokens and 2189 lines changed
Fable 5 medium: 37,000 tokens and 1 line changed

Fable's solution worked, Codex just made a mess.

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/goal is a special command for OpenAI Codex in which it will keep working toward whatever goal you set until it gradually convinces itself that the stated goal is not what you wanted but rather some much easier objective was the real goal all along.

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Demoed a component of my unreleased memorization app today. Reactions included:

• "Scary!"
• "I kinda want the opposite actually"
• "Do you want me to NOT use your app?"

Things are going great.

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Now that I stand to gain very little financially from posting correct takes on the Internet, I find myself less motivated to post correct takes on the Internet.

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In 2025, I bought four WD Black 8TB NVMe SSDs, slammed them in a Thunderbolt enclosure, and set them up as a 32TB Raid 0 volume for my Mac Studio.

Price in April 2025: $2,199.96
Price today: $5,836.00

Felt stupidly expensive at the time, but now I feel like a genius.

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I joked last year that by leveraging coding agents I now "played the orchestra", by directing multiple programmers at once.

I have changed jobs again. Now I tell Fable to conduct an orchestra of Opus 5 agents for me. It's closed 55 GitHub issues in 6 hours across my iOS apps.

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Update on using MacBook Neo for dev tasks: this is definitely a device you should to reboot daily, even without Chrome or any Electron apps.

This morning, Zed (a native Rust app) was 500% CPU without a single window open, 3 macOS internal daemons had crashed, 800ms input lag.

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Using MacBook Neo for "real" development work and it's simultaneously juggling:

• Running Claude Code in three tabs at once
• Compiling multi-package Xcode builds
• Automating two iOS Simulators and a Mac build of my app

Hasn't missed a beat. Not bad for a phone chip.

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