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.
The joy I get out of programming has slowly waned over the years, because most interesting problems are now "solved" via standard libraries, open-source dependencies, and HTTP APIs. Novel problem solving gradually gave way to "digital pipefitting" of stuff built by others.
When I work late or long hours coding something, it is expressly NOT because I enjoy it. It's because I can't stomach the thought of wasting another day of my life on this shit.
Best reason to use Codex CLI over Claude Code is the limits. I've been HAMMERING gpt-5-high for >8 hours/day all week. It's the last day of the week and I haven't hit 35% of the weekly limit.
If I'd paid the same $200/mo for Claude, I'd have been locked out by day 2.
A cruel irony of coding agents is that everyone who blew off automated testing for the past 20 years is now telling the AI to do TDD all the time.
But because LLMs were trained on decades of their shitty tests, the agents are also terrible at testing.
When working with a coding agent, a great periodic housekeeping task is to ask it to evaluate the codebase against the principles and values you've laid out in your CLAUDE/AGENTS/RULES files.
Agents frequently violate one's rules while coding, but will also spot those deviations after the fact if asked.
lol I thought Codex CLI misspelled a field, but nope: TikTok actually misspelled "publicaly_available_post_id" in their API developers.tiktok.com/doc/content-posting-api-reference-get-video-status
Have now received multiple apology emails from people who called my previous post a "hit job." First time for everything. justin.searls.co/links/2025-10-09-people-jumped-to-conclusions-about-this-rubygems-thing/
Reading this, I feel good about not jumping to conclusions about the RubyGems situation. The narrative that Shopify is the bad guy was quick to spread, but evidence never followed. And the most compelling facts are still not public. byroot.github.io/opensource/ruby/2025/10/09/dear-rubyists.html
Who the hell called it a Strategic Advisory Firm and not a SWOT Team?
This post is both correct and irrelevant. If you get paid to write "good enough" code, agents are already faster—so it's rational for employers to expect you use them. I get 3x more done with agents, but the experience is so frustrating I hate coding now hojberg.xyz/the-programmer-identity-crisis/
Any Fastmail users have advice on managing spam? I've always heard that its spam filter is "nearly as good as Gmail", but in practice I get ~10-15 cold-call B2B drip campaign emails get through me today, even though I always banish them to the Junk folder to train it.
Coding agents have really improved my self esteem. It used to be that I'd get mad at myself when I couldn't get my code to work. Now I get mad at the computer when it can't get my code to work.
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