Justin Searls

Pro-tip to any devs who only discovered TDD thanks to coding agents: refactoring is inherently directional. It's more like prefactoring—you rearrange code to make the next change easy. That means you (and your agent) should know the next planned change before you refactor!

One year into living with Tesla Full-Self Driving and: it's good.

The improvement from v13 to v14 is remarkable. Tap Start and it pulls out of the garage, drives you, and parks itself. Another tap and it drives home, opens garage, parks itself. More advanced than people assume.

How many billions of dollars does Anthropic need to update their apps to preserve newlines on paste? Absolutely bizarre how bad their apps are.

I'm developing apps for Apple platforms for the first time in 16 years so stop me if this is nuts, but the best feedback loops I've managed are when I've made the Mac build the primary one. No simulator jank. No waiting on devices.

Claude Code doing a better job self-verifying

I like my doctor but his office is always full of sick people.

Sometimes for old times' sake, I'll Google for something instead of just asking an AI agent.

The new No Man's Sky × Wall•E mashup looks great https://youtu.be/tPuqNYu5kBs

PSA: iPhone Air's microphone is located on the left side of the bottom edge of the device, AKA where a right-handed person's pinky would naturally rest when gripping the phone with one hand.

Anyway, that's why all your videos sound like shit. You're holding it wrong.

Added a /prove skill to my prove_it library. It pushes Claude Code to go beyond merely analyzing source and running tests to demonstrate the code is working.

Example: it spun up a complete example project and ACTUALLY proved my cached test runner works https://github.com/searlsco/prove_it

One happy accident of the fact that Claude Code Opus 4.6 turns seem to reliably take 3-5 minutes in my experience is that it's proving to be the perfect companion to a strength training workout.

I just write prompts between sets.

Free idea: hyperbolic_links.

Let users create symbolic links mapped to HTTP resources. Since you can't literally link a file to a URL without changing the actual file system, hyperbolic would centrally handle journaling, cache/etag, updates.

I just haggled with a chatbot https://justin.searls.co/shots/2026-02-08-09h57m02s/

My prove_it CLI is already proving valuable. Just watched Opus 4.6 complete an hourlong rewrite without me… ONLY because 6 times prove_it's own script & agent hooks blocked Claude from prematurely declaring victory. It's letting me focus on WHAT, not HOW https://github.com/searlsco/prove_it

Is the tool bad or is it a skill issue? https://justin.searls.co/links/2026-02-06-is-the-tool-bad-or-is-it-a-skill-issue/

I bought a Doggett https://justin.searls.co/shots/2026-02-05-20h17m49s/

New episode of Breaking Change is live! SpaceXXX https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v50-spacexxx/

"3 things: reusable rockets, AI via satellite; and a real-time free speech platform. Rockets, space-based AI, and free speech. Rockets, AI…are you getting it? These are not three separate companies, this is one company, and we're calling it SpaceXXX" https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex

I do not miss thinking hard https://www.jernesto.com/articles/thinking_hard

A recurring theme in coverage on the effect AI will have on wealth/income inequality suggests there's a strong case to be made that AI is going to be bad for poor people.

I have nothing useful to add to that discussion, so here's a word I just invented: Agentrification

Whether or not the Xcode agent is any good (I'm dubious), the fact Xcode itself is exposing first-party MCP tools is great news—trying to get Claude/Codex to do fucking anything right in iOS is agonizing. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111428/

We're gonna need a bigger Shovel… https://justin.searls.co/links/2026-02-02-were-gonna-need-a-bigger-shovel/