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.
Anyone else's Lutron Caseta system go down last night? App can't connect to hub, which won't go online. I want to blame the AWS outage before I start ripping apart networking gear.
TIL from John Hawthorn: If you use Kagi Search you can now search !rb String#gsub
This is so cool! Zero configuration required johnhawthorn.com/2025/searching-ruby-docs/
I never used to reach out to touch my MacBook screen after using my iPad, but because each 26 OS looks so similar, I'm doing it all the time now.
All according to keikaku.
"This is just proof that Matz is in bed with the fascists!" said somebody on Bluesky, I'm sure.
To be clear, this is an unmitigated GOOD THING and is a decade overdue IMNSHO. ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/10/17/rubygems-repository-transition/
Holy shit, a thing I made in college has a Wikipedia page?! And no one told me?! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KnightCite
Ruby is 30 years old, there's so much left to solve that it'd be too much to ask them to finally add support for naming methods with an interrobang. (I would accept either this?! or that‽)
I'm serious! Have you never seen a predicate method with a side effect?!
Genuinely curious how long it will be until we have our first local LLM-based computer virus that generates code and uses tools to creatively replicate itself.
A nonzero number of programmers under 30 assume GraphQL is a legacy technology invented by Texas Instruments in the 90s and had something to do with graphing calculators.
When coding agents fail to accomplish what we task them with, very often it's because the codebase has complications we failed to anticipate and communicate. It's easy to get mad at the AI, but reckoning with technical debt requires your awareness and involvement, too.
After a fabulously productive weekend with Codex CLI shipping a set of features that would have taken me two weeks, it is now past 9 AM on a weekday in San Francisco and it's struggling to add two numbers together again. What a world.
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?