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.


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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My ARSE® process for building apps with coding agents:

[A]mbitiously create by handing an agent a HUGE task to do over hours/days
[R]age at your computer as you uncover all its stupid decisions
[S]culpt the app by fixing things in shorter, bursty sessions
[E]njoy what you built

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I think the iPhone Duo might serve me well in the Post-Programming Era. Now that 90% of my work is remotely coordinating Codex and Claude from my phone, I need a desktop-class browser more than I need a full-size laptop. Carrying your computer just interrupts the agents, anyway.

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Normally, the best way to watch an Apple event is the TV app on an Apple TV, but damn if their use of maxed-out HDR for visualizations combined with sudden cuts back to SDR footage didn't make it feel like every shot of a human was dim and washed out.

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Maybe it's because I got to see it in IMAX, but I really liked Christopher Nolan's Castaway reboot.

Casting Zendaya as Wilson was a bold choice, though.

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Biggest knock on Astra so far is that when I raise an issue during a long-running task, it will acknowledge my concern and then stop all work. Then I put the Tim Cook anecdote with "then why are you still here?" in my AGENTS.md and that seems to have fixed it.

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First Astra impressions: it's like Fable, but faster.

If you value your time, I can't see why you'd drive a coding agent with anything less than a Fable/Astra model. They produce so much less rework.

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Asked Codex and Claude Code to each try their hand at a tricky Core Text layout issue for Japanese vertical writing:

GPT 5.6 Sol xHigh: 1,581,445 tokens and 2189 lines changed
Fable 5 medium: 37,000 tokens and 1 line changed

Fable's solution worked, Codex just made a mess.

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