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.

Over the last 20 years, my time in Japan felt like Season 1 of Pluribus. A nation acting in harmony, going from happy to see me everywhere I went to constantly signaling they "need some space"

In cities, it's thanks to over-tourism. In the country, it's anti-immigrant populism.

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Tooling for coding agents is overly focused on scaling numerous parallel workers instead of ensuring correctness. That continues to be where all my time goes and is the real barrier to scaling up. (e.g., Why am I exploratory testing this UI when vision models could be doing it?)

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This Opus 4.5 failure mode rarely happens with Codex: Claude copy-pasted a source listing by mistake, edited that instead of the correct file, declared success. When I pointed out its error, it confidently asserted: "The code is correct - this is a browser caching issue." 🖕

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After hearing lots of Opus 4.5 hype, I decided to switch to Claude Code this month from Codex CLI (with which I have a separate set of frustrations), and I've learned two things:

  1. Claude Code is significantly more productive (parallel by default) and generally smarter (smarter coding) than it was in August

  2. When literally anything goes wrong, it routinely takes the path of least resistance (making excuses, declaring victory when things don't work, reaching for workarounds when basic reason points elsewhere)

Disappointed overall. Both GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 (and their CLI's surrounding chrome) feel barely improved since last summer.

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Commuter trains in Tokyo are so packed that the tip of my iPhone triggered proximity contact sharing via AirDrop with the passenger next to me.

I didn't want to admit it was a mistake, so we're getting lunch together now. Will probably be in his wedding at this rate.

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Over the last year, every SaaS app launch has been followed by a competing vibe-coded clone app within days or weeks. Time to update the Silicon Valley shitheel lexicon:

TIRED: "Fast follow"
WIRED: "Sloppy seconds"

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AI companies touting scale as how much electricity they consume is insane. Should steel companies report output via CO2 emissions? If more efficient technology
comes requiring less power, how do you handle having trained analysts to equate power consumption with success?

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What happened to Japanese men? When I was in college, everyone respected onsen etiquette—washing before entering a public bath. Today, the majority just splash water on their junk and jump in the water

Worldwide, right-wing political lurches seem to give men cover to be assholes

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