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.

On one hand, I'm glad that this fleet of agents is finally taking full advantage of the resources on my Ultra-class Mac Studio.

On the other hand, I'm a little annoyed that redlining macOS in ways that manual human activity never could (24/7 sustained memory, disk, and CPU pressure) results in kernel panics and data loss as often as it does.

Copied!
2.0k likes ·

Many of the same people who were incredulous about the iPhone Air's camera and durability all seem to be hyped out of their minds for iPhone Duo, which has a comparably bad camera and is certifiably less durable. The thing's literally an Air with extra pieces that can break!

Copied!
1.9k likes ·

Recursive code review:

  1. Orchestrator assigns implementer subagent
  2. Reviewer subagent hunts for bugs
  3. Orchestrator vets findings; implementer fixes real ones
  4. Repeat 2–3 until no valid findings remain

Typically takes 2–8 rounds.

Copied!
2.4k likes ·

Just filled my car with gas for the first time since February or March, and it cost $4.22 a gallon

Then sent a single document to Japan via FedEx, and they charged me over $100 for the cheapest/slowest rate—almost half of which was fuel surcharges.

Very cool and totally normal.

Copied!
388 likes ·

A lot is riding on local models becoming "good enough" for agentic coding workflows.

The fact I've gone from "I only trust Fable and Astra" to "Opus 5.5 is just as good as either" to "Sonnet 5.5 is basically good enough" in less than a month is augurs well for future local LLMs

Copied!
2.8k likes ·

Over a year ago, I stopped reading code and started automating adversarial agents to perform recursive code reviews instead.

The result: low-defect systems that do what I want. Can't believe anyone engaging seriously with these tools still believes human code review is superior

Copied!
3.8k likes ·

Don't sleep on Sonnet 5.5, I pushed four extremely ambitious features across several iOS apps today with Opus 5.5 dispatching a gob-smacking number of Sonnet agents and still haven't hit 20% of my weekly cap in about 9 hours of wall time. Features turned out great. Impressed.

Copied!
1.8k likes ·

Was burning through both the Codex and Claude $200 plans just triaging SwiftUI issues across my suite of apps.

Told it to abort UI testing after at most one fix attempt and token consumption dropped 80%.

I have become the impatient manager telling devs to quit testing so much.

Copied!
864 likes ·

I explained to Becky that my $400 AI subscriptions don't actually pay for tokens. They pay for a 10-20x multiple of some base level of an unspecified amount of "usage", and that said base amount of usage changes arbitrarily without notice.

It sounds pretty stupid when you say it

Copied!
4.0k likes ·

2016: Developers are too expensive to waste time verifying software manually, so make computers run automated tests.

2026: Agents are too expensive to waste tokens running automated tests, so make developers verify software manually.

Copied!
861 likes ·

People have been begging David to loosen his grip on Rails or even to walk away entirely for 20 years. Now that he's signaling interest in walking away, the same people are pissed as hell. Smart.

Copied!
643 likes ·

Seems like Anthropic cut the Opus 5.5 allowance last week. Ran out of weekly usage on a 20x plan 4 days in. Spent that last day optimizing my workflows to be more token efficient, and now I'm 38 hours since using my free reset and I'm already halfway thru my weekly cap.

Copied!
747 likes ·

I always challenge new models to take on work I wouldn't have previously assumed they could accomplish.

Kudos to Astra. I asked if it could edit the audio of my latest podcast in Logic (explaining what that meant), and it trepidatiously noped out before even attempting it lol

Copied!
3.6k likes ·
1
2
3
4
5
36