Justin Searls

If Nothing releases a folding phone, they should absolutely name it the Nothing Burger www.pcmag.com/…

Dear prospective sponsors,

You can't pay me to say nice things about you, but you CAN pay me to not say mean things about you. Please send inquiries to sponsorship@searls.co www.theverge.com/…

You know, a lot of lefties are loathe to admit that the oil companies have been working hard to abolish ICE since before most of them were born

"$599 is a fucking statement." daringfireball.net/…

A lot of people were confused by Trump's immediate embrace of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, but it makes a lot more sense when you consider that he thinks they spell it "Golf"

Can confirm, Claude Cowork is very cool, but if you actually use it for more than a few minutes it'll bring any Mac to its knees. Entire system becomes unresponsive eventually. github.com/…

The M4 iPad Air is notable, because it will set Apple apart as the only company to release a product in 2026 sporting more RAM for the same price as the outgoing model. (8GB to 12GB) www.macrumors.com/…

Skynet any% Sure feels like some combination of AI, the US military, and the AI military could bring an end to the world any day now, so I figured I'd better record one last show for posterity. Welcome me on this version's speedrun to the apocalypse! So long as the EMP blasts don't nuke all our ham radios, write in to podcast@searls.co and I'll read it on the next release of the program. Over. Be sure to click all these links while the clickin's good:

New episode of Breaking Change is live! Skynet any%

Was always so inspired by that speech where JFK said "we will go to the moon... or do some other stuff instead" www.theguardian.com/…

The new Star Trek Voyager game is such a thorough simulation that I think it's convinced me to abandon my dreams of becoming joining Starfleet when I grow up. Being a captain is no fun at all!

Agents are ushering in the Antisocial Coding era The first time I visited GitHub's HQ2 in 2012, they had a TV showing off their first animations of Mona (https://brand.github.com/graphic-elements/mascots#mona) and were using it to push their new tagline: Social Coding. The phrase certainly captured the moment we were living in, so in 2014, I borrowed it for the title of one of my more popular conference talks, The Social Coding Contract (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFRU6eQKp4Y). The goal of that presentation was to warn audiences of the long-term risks of all these tools making it so trivially easy to publish and consume open source dependencies. Sure enough, what followed was a decade defined by the productive and destructive chaos of a ceaseless deluge of useful, but poorly-understood and under-maintained dependencies. Thanks to the upheaval being caused by coding agents, I believe we've entered a new era without realizing it, one that might be called Antisocial Coding. Three things I've been chewing on lately: • Agents blow out team communication costs. Last year, Scott Werner (https://worksonmymachine.ai/p/the-parallel-lives-of-an-ai-engineer) compared a developer orchestrating agents to an octopus with 8 autonomous arms and I replied to point out how this creates a hub-and-spoke communication crisis (/links/2025-08-03-there-is-no-ai-in-team/) that would prove unwieldy for traditional multi-developer collaboration. Since then, I've been advising startups to stay single-developer for as long as possible and telling larger organizations to start moving to one-repo-per-human wherever they can—even if it means re-architecting their systems to align with this. • Agent-built codebases calcify quickly. Last night, Caleb Hearth (https://calebhearth.com) texted to tell me he'd created several issues on turbocommit (https://github.com/searlsco/turbocommit), and I'm ashamed to admit my brain was so overwhelmed with six terminal tabs of unrelated WIP features that I brusquely denied all of them. Caleb shared a keen insight: many agent-led codebases are becoming impenetrably large and complex extremely early in their lifespan—even while the userbase is still limited to the original creator. And on reflection, I do sense a certain ossification in the projects I encounter lately—so tightly coupled to one person's hyper-specific needs that they lack room to grow or change by the time other users arrive. Beads (https://github.com/steveyegge/beads) is the perfect example: I spent two weeks trying to use it, but at 4 months old it was already far too complex and brittle to integrate into my workflow • Open source is closing its doors. Yesterday, tldraw (https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw) took the unusual step of removing the tests from their codebase (https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/closed-tests/), on the theory their continued presence would make it far too easy for anyone with an agent to build a cleanroom rewrite and undermine their business. Nothing says "closed for contributions" quite like not even having access to a test suite or CI to work with I don't feel strongly about any of this, because I'm mostly a loner to begin with. But this trend will likely have troubling impacts for teams and organizations. • If the last decade of social coding taught us anything, it's that pinning the continuity of your business operations on a bunch of software for which the bus factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) is 1 is an unacceptable liability. If the next decade is typified by an explosion of solo projects, then the rational response will be to adopt fewer dependencies and have agents build more in-house implementations—even if it means shouldering more maintenance costs and security risks • Unlocking the maximum productivity afforded by agents by sequestering individual human developers to their own discrete fiefdoms (whether at the repository, CODEOWNERS (https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-code-owners) file, or some other boundary) will only accelerate the trend of discouraging contributions from others, compounding the above issue at scale and throughout engineering organizations • While many people are (rightly (https://justin.searls.co/posts/brace-for-the-fuckening/)) concerned about AI's impact on the job prospects of less-experienced developers, the continued erosion of collective code ownership (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeOwnership.html) coupled with a trend away from inter-person collaboration will further slam the door on opportunities for mentorship and apprenticeship, exacerbating the widening gap in potential value creation between juniors and seniors I've never had more fun building stuff than I'm having right now, but that doesn't change any of the above. These are important things to be watching out for. Engineering leaders should probably consider the downstream effects discussed here before plowing ahead with plans to reorient their organizations around what's best for maximizing the productivity of semi-autonomous coding agents.

Agents are ushering in the Antisocial Coding era

If you've posted an issue to any of my repos and I never responded: GitHub apparently disabled automatic watching for new repositories last year and nobody noticed. Issues are now graveyards from Day 1.

No wonder my inbox has been so peaceful! github.com/…

My coding agent harnesses are designed to enable parallel serial work—multiple agents running in multiple tabs, all committing to main instead of worktrees.

turbocommit does this by linking each session's commits: github.com/…

Ever hear of the Cart of Thesius? It's when every single item you ordered from Instacart has been replaced with something else. It's a thought experiment: are the bags on your porch still your order?

Their customer support contends that it is. I feel pretty strongly that it's not.

Speaking of me nailing predictions, I feel like this one from 2023 is aging like wine. Not least of which because the decades-long debate over "10x developers" has been rendered moot by agents. testdouble.com/…

Are they sure it was the Citrini Research sci-fi substack that caused the crash and not my much tighter, more grounded "Brace for the Fuckening" post written three days prior?

Who's to say. apple.news/…

The startup acronym of the day is "DTC", which stands for Down To Consume.

Common feedback when I write about AI: "if job loss is a real risk, then tell people WTF to do beyond, 'generate more revenue than you cost your employer!'"

Answer: if there were a process or playbook to make yourself irreplaceable, AI agents would follow it. And replace you.

Saying "please" and "thank you to Siri:

iOS 5-26: idiotic waste of time
iOS 27+: productivity life hack

Over and over again, agents like Claude Code exhibit relentless productivity, exhaustive research, and mind-bending speed. But there's one thing they constitutionally lack: innovative solutions in the face of apparent obstacles.

Humans who lack that gear are absolutely fucked.

A VP of Engineering wrote in to say my latest essay, "is fantastic and terrifying and absolutely necessary for us to be having conversations about." And that most people still, "have no idea what we're actually on the precipice of." justin.searls.co/…

Just had a really clever idea, but because I now work with 5 instances of Claude instead of actual humans—and knowing they'll all forget how smart I just was in a median 125k tokens from now—it feels kind of hollow.

So FYI, I just had a great fucking idea. Feelin' cute.

It's been a weird experience enabling turbocommit on my repos and watching it do a better job titling commits than I ever do. That it preserves my agent transcripts in the commit message alongside code changes is really nice! github.com/…

Glad to see John Roberts finally take meaningful action on America's affordability crisis. Just like the framers intended.

Brace for the Fuckening It was only once I read Andrew Yang's "The End of the Office" (https://blog.andrewyang.com/p/the-end-of-the-office) post the other day that I realized how few political leaders are seriously grappling with this question: what will happen to civilization if all this AI investment actually pays off? Sitting with this thought led me to a dark place, if I'm being honest—not because society might be doomed, but because I'm left quoting Andrew Fucking Yang of all people: Expect the Starbucks in your local suburb to become occupied with middle-aged former office workers who want to get out of the house. That's a benign portrait, but a lot of these families still owe mortgages on their houses that they won't be able to maintain. If I were a homeowner in Silicon Valley or Westchester County, I might consider putting my house up for sale to see what I could get because there's going to be downward pressure on these communities. It might not feel great being first, but you don't want to be last. Then again, why should I be surprised that politicians aren't thinking about this? Almost nobody is! AI boosters are having too much fun playing with Claude Code (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NFA.djaw.TBlAp8kE_N-i) to connect the dots between its current capabilities and the post-office-work utopia/dystopia (/takes/2026-02-17-08h30m19s/) that awaits us. Meanwhile, AI skeptics seem worryingly self-assured in their wishcasting that today's agents: 1. Will never be able to do the things they can already do 2. Will forever remain as incompetent as they are now 3. Will disappear the moment the AI economic bubble bursts Other than the first item on that list, I don't even know that the skeptics are wrong! Maybe they're right! In fact, it'd be more convenient for all of us if the skeptics end up being right. But are we really certain that the probability Sam Altman is even kinda-sorta right is literally zero percent? If not, then we should probably prepare for that potentiality. I imagine that we all have a pretty clear image of what will happen if the AI bubble pops: stocks will crash, Steam Decks will be back in stock (https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/handheld-gaming/valve-confirms-steam-deck-is-out-of-stock-due-to-memory-and-storage-shortages-supply-of-popular-gaming-handheld-in-trouble-because-of-massive-ai-demand), and Sam will end up in jail. (Maybe every disastrous hype cycle in tech simply demands that at least one awkward white man named Sam goes to jail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Arrest_and_charges).) But I've got to admit, many people I talk to and follow online don't seem to have given a second thought to the sort of economic hellscape we're in for if the astronomical valuations of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX (lol (/casts/breaking-change-v50-spacexxx/)) turn out to have been appropriately priced. Well, give it thirty seconds' thought, and—to borrow Yang's term of choice—we'll be in for The Fuckening : a macroeconomically significant decrease in the number of high-paying white collar jobs the market will support. ## Tech CEOs are bullshitting us (https://justin.searls.co/posts/brace-for-the-fuckening/#tech-ceos-are-bullshitting-us) Listen to Satya or Sam or Jensen talk about this "What if?" scenario, and you'll hear them compare AI to technological revolutions of the past. They each breathlessly declare, "there will be new jobs (https://abcnews.com/Business/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-discusses-jobs-future/story?id=50189787)," and that AI will, "create a bunch of new ones (https://www.businessinsider.com/will-ai-replace-take-over-create-jobs-debate-tech-leaders-2025-6)," and even that, "there will be more jobs (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-7197a015-874a-4832-8865-21cff7a760ba)." But, as someone who's been using coding agents to build good-enough (https://justin.searls.co/shovelware/) software with the velocity of a traditional engineering team for nearly a year now, none of these reassurances pass the smell test. The idea that there will be at least one net-new job created for every job eliminated by AI simply isn't credible. Remember, for the purposes of this post, we're playing out the scenario labeled "what if these AI investments actually pan out?" That scenario isn't compatible with a future where companies find themselves needing just as many highly-compensated humans as they do today—the ROI needed (https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/%242-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend---bain--companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/) to justify this level of investment simply wouldn't be there. So why are the AI executives talking out of both sides of their mouth? Because, what else the fuck are they supposed to do? Go on the record and say, "yeah man, I dunno, now's probably a good time to learn how to can your own food (https://www.amazon.com/Canning-Kits/b?node=3737041) or sell your house if you happen to live in a mid-market metro with a strong services sector." Whenever I hear one of these guys' bullshit quotes, I have to mentally sprinkle in the unspoken context to protect my own sanity: • " There will be new jobs for people with deep domain expertise and unusually strong critical thinking skills." • "Looking at jobs as a debt counselor or estate auctioneer? AI will create a bunch of new ones." • "If you can swallow a massive pay cut and don't mind shutting doors for a living (https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/waymo-is-asking-doordash-drivers-to-shut-the-doors-of-its-self-driving-cars/), there will be more jobs." ## Programmers are first in, last out (https://justin.searls.co/posts/brace-for-the-fuckening/#programmers-are-first-in-last-out) Software developers may be among the first to experience what it feels like for AI to do our jobs for us, but I still believe we'll be the ones shutting the lights off on the middle class (/links/2023-03-17-how-to-tell-if-ai-threatens-your-job/). In fact, programmers are about to become as busy as we've ever been. Why? Because custom software has historically been supply-constrained (/links/2025-11-04-software-is-supply-constrained-for-now/). How many businesses would have been created over the last twenty years if even extremely basic apps didn't require millions of dollars of venture funding? Already, agents can help capture those opportunities on a relative shoestring. A tremendous number of niche, overlooked cottage industries are finally ripe for their ✨disruption✨ moment. And all those projects still need human programmers! Why? Because today's agents are nowhere close to being able to write software that won't fall over without supervision. The last 10% needed to reach full autonomy will take 90% of the effort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule). My Tesla has driven me everywhere for over a year (/takes/2026-02-14-16h27m06s/), but it'll be decades before the world stops manufacturing steering wheels. Programmers may be spread across more companies and working in smaller teams, but there likely won't be a net reduction in the amount of total work to be done anytime soon. But can we honestly say the same about the accountant who's been rendered redundant? Or the junior lawyer position the firm opted not to fill? Or the management consultant who realizes their client can buy the same peace of mind with a $20 ChatGPT Plus subscription? Where are they all going to go? The answer is obvious: if this whole "AI thing" ends up becoming what it's cracked up to be, those people are well and truly fucked. And sooner than they probably realize. ## Make your work worthwhile (https://justin.searls.co/posts/brace-for-the-fuckening/#make-your-work-worthwhile) Ultimately, unless we see AI crash and burn catastrophically, I feel pretty comfortable predicting that if the only sounds your job makes are *clickety-clack* and *yackety-yack* , the bulk of your colleagues—and very possibly you—are going to be caught up in the gravitational vortex of what Andrew Yang is calling The Fuckening. So, what can you do to mitigate these risks and protect yourself? All you need to do is follow my fool-proof two-step plan: 1. Acknowledge that the odds we're living in The Fuckening timeline are greater than zero 2. Plan accordingly If you're a programmer and your current role doesn't resemble that of a full-breadth developer (/posts/full-breadth-developers/), do something about that ASAP. If you're anyone else, then follow this bit of advice buried inside that larger post: Figure out how your employer makes money and position your ass directly in-between the corporate bank account and your customers' credit card information. Do the work: trace your individual contributions to the total revenue and cost savings they represent for your employer. Is that number demonstrably higher than your fully-loaded compensation? If so, you should be okay. And whenever the AI tools in your space improve appreciably, re-examine your contributions and run the numbers again. But as soon as you cost more to your employer than you bring in, don't assume they'll keep you around—figure out how to increase your output! And if the numbers are totally upside down, find someplace new where your cost will be commensurate with your value. All I have is individualized advice, because our individual situations are all we have control over. Yes, there are countless collective actions we could take as a society to mitigate or even eliminate these downside employment risks. There are probably even public policy prescriptions that could position civilization to absolutely thrive in the age of AI. But the odds of either of those happening in the current political climate are even lower than (ugh) Sam Altman ending up being proven right about all this shit. I'm expressly not suggesting we treat each other as if we're living out a workplace adaptation of The Hunger Games here. I'm just reminding you to secure your own oxygen mask first before assisting others.

Brace for the Fuckening

Honestly after 15 years of hiring reporters to write but not report, maybe it's time we tried hiring them to report but not write www.cleveland.com/…

If you're with me on team #CommitsDontMatter, then you might be interested in this Claude hook that just auto-commits after every turn with the title coming from Claude's result and the body containing the originating prompt gist.github.com/…

One thing I haven't heard many people talking about is that coding agents can more or less cured RSI after decades of mashing out programs by hands for decades.

Not saying programmers will be remembered as coal miners or 9/11 heroes or anything, but I'm not not saying that.

Pointed Claude Cowork at two Japanese lease applications in Excel. It asked me a few questions, then filled both perfectly. (Better than I could—when I did the same via Excel for macOS, I broke the lookup formulas.)

Welcome to the identity crisis, fellow office workers!

Bought a bag of pears 3 weeks ago and they're still hard as rocks. Really looking forward to that 8 hour window next week when they all simultaneously ripen before rotting the following day.