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.


It is very surprising that disabling iPhone/iPad auto-lock (say, changing from "3 minutes" to "Never") doesn't require an authentication step. Bad actor with temporary access to your device could enable it and wait until you leave your phone out and fail to explicitly lock it.

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I read way too many comments about DHH's Rails World keynote, and the substantive arguments seem pretty thin. Some people who love Ruby and Rails seem to feel disappointed/depressed/afraid to be told the things they care about don't matter anymore. reddit.com/r/rails

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Across my 6 iOS apps, each GitHub issue is automatically triaged and assigned by an orchestrator agent to be implemented by a subagent UNLESS it's been labeled as "human" for specification or verification reasons.

At this point, less than 10% of issues are labeled "human"

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Apple has been extremely cagey around usage limits for Private Cloud Compute, only sharing that subscribers of higher tiers of iCloud+ are allowed more usage.

Well, my apps make liberal use of Apple's language models and I'm now constantly hitting my PCC usage limits. Welp!

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It's too bad Amphetamine for macOS is free. Given how many engineers' AI workflows depend on keeping their MacBooks awake at all hours, if only they'd charged a subscription they probably could have raised $50M at a $3B valuation by now.

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First impressions: Series 12 is a massive performance improvement. Siri AI is much faster than on the 11, and for the first time the podcast app can actually play and download shows on demand without crapping out multiple times.

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Codex is extremely frustrating in that when you send "steering" instructions reminding it to do the work in a certain way, it will almost always reply to acknowledge the request and then STOP ALL WORK.

I've tried coaxing it to keep working in AGENTS.md, but no luck.

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A skill we need to learn is how to ratchet up our ambitions until we uncover what the models truly cannot do. And each time they're improved, to once again test the fences. Confidence and certainty in one's own workflow have become trademark signs of ignorance and complacency.

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By far the biggest change in the agentic coding era has been that I'm no longer chained to my computer all day. Just got more done by sending a few messages from my iPhone on the driving range than I would normally achieve in an eight-hour work day at my desk.

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Say what you will about macOS Tahoe, but it accomplished the longest uptime I've ever experienced on a Mac (131 days, 40 mins) after 4+ months overseas. I tapped the dusty keyboard, and it immediately woke up my janky 6K Dell display as if I'd never left.

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