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.
Developing native Apple apps is generally much slower and tedious with agents than building web applications. That said, platform constraints can be liberating—with exactly one or two possible ways to accomplish something, an agent can monkey-on-typewriter until it figures it out
Interviewing Zach Holman this morning on Hot Fix about AI and our discontents. Have something you want us to talk about? Let me know: justin.searls.co/feedback/
The vast majority of programmers are late adopters. They don't follow programming news. They show up, do the job, go home. They may hear about things through the grapevine. They might go to a conference every 2 years. But they typically don't take the time to play with new stuff
I complete agree coding agents make software engineering harder, but the rub is that many professional software engineers are pretty bad at these new hard things and it's hard to see how they're not totally screwed. simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/24/harder/
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
For seemingly the sixth time in my career, DHH has arrived at the same conclusion I have—this time, that AI coding means we should be building more native apps, because development cost is no longer the bottleneck—but the way he goes about talking about it couldn't be more different youtu.be/vDjW_dRyKXY?t=1457&is=t5lg25x_naMgYtEB