I'm experiencing what breathing out of my nose properly feels like for the first time. Everything is new and wondrous and I've never felt so optimistic. This sensation lasted for two days and now I'm used to it and existence is once again pain. Share your existential musings at [email protected] and I'll nod and sigh along. I might even nod and sigh performatively for you on the show! Important ground covered in this episode:

I spent my holiday weekend gaining massive respect for the small-form factor (SFF) PC gaming community. Holy shit, was this a pain in the ass. BUT, it's a fraction the size, way faster, and whisper quiet compared to my outgoing build. Glad I did it. • Inspired by this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk5mZUngwbA) • Which you can buy from them (https://www.radiumpcs.com/products/ncase-m2-titan) • My parts list (https://pcpartpicker.com/list/mmcZ6Q) 😮‍💨

Hello! We're all busy, so I'm going to try my hand at writing less this time. Glance over at your scrollbar now to see how I did. Since we last corresponded: • Dropped in on the Ruby AI podcast (https://justin.searls.co/casts/merge-commits-ruby-ai-tldr-of-ai-dev/) • Added a new cable (https://justin.searls.co/shots/2025-10-25-12h35m39s/) to the increasing number of cables plugging my face into my computer, which shipped with some pretty glaring issues (https://justin.searls.co/posts/how-to-downgrade-vision-pro-dfu-mode/), some of which I talked about (https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v45-developer-strap-on/) • Found somebody else saying that, in the short term, AI codegen is going to dramatically increase the demand (https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era) for software as the supply constraint on programming eases (https://justin.searls.co/links/2025-11-04-software-is-supply-constrained-for-now/) • Made an open source library called Straight-to-Video (https://searlsco.github.io/straight-to-video/) that performs client-side remuxing and transcoding of videos, beating them into shape for upload via the Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok APIs • Hosted my brother after he sold his house, which (of course) coincided with nonstop power and Internet outages. Rather than do something about it, I complained into my microphone (https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v46-adjusted-gross-intelligence/) • Mourned the fact iPhone 18 Air apparently got cancelled or delayed (https://justin.searls.co/links/2025-11-10-rip-iphone-18-air/) to Spring 2027, continuing my losing streak of falling in love with Apple's least popular hardware • Learned I have huge fucking turbinates (https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v47-turbinately-ill/), even relative to my already huge fucking head My good friend Ken (https://www.instagram.com/kenpozek) took me to the Magic game last night some number of nights ago. It was a great game because we were losing very badly, and then it became very close, and then, right at the end—we won! The classic comeback narrative arc was fulfilled. Sports! I was reflecting on life the other day, which is a thing I do more often now that I'm firmly in Phase 3 of my evil plan (https://justin.searls.co/mails/2024-11/#the-third-phase-of-life) to ride off into the sunset and gradually be forgotten by all of you. My original plan for this essay would have pulled at the common thread that ties things like game design, derivatives trading, reality shows, and sports betting together. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, it was taking me too long, and I'm now running out of time in November to give you a recap on what happened in October. (By the way, don't be surprised if I just send you all a postcard for the December issue. I'm still new at running a monthly newsletter, and I'd prefer not to find out what happens when I fall more than a month behind. Feel free to demand a refund by replying to this message.) So, anyway, like I said, my actual essay fell apart. Instead, I'm going to share a personal example of how a series of consequential decisions can paradoxically be both productive & rational, while simultaneously being costly & misguided. ## I'd do it all again (https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-10/#id-do-it-all-again) It all started with one stray piece of unsolicited feedback.

How it goes. How it always goes.

Had a little pep in my step this time. Maybe it's because I decided to start recording after 7 AM for once. Maybe it's because I can finally fucking breathe out of my nose holes. Tell me about what you do while you continue to draw breath at [email protected]. Things you can read if you're bored:

Lately, I've been reminded of the heady days of my agile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) youth by how often I've found myself asking, "how will we test this?" As I've mentioned frequently on podcasts and recent Q&As about AI, an odd paradox has emerged in the software industry: 1. Developers experienced in agile engineering practices like test-driven development tend to be among the most skeptical of AI code generation, often citing fears that software quality is being thrown out the window 2. Developers experienced in agile engineering practices like test-driven development tend to be among the most successful at building great software with coding agents, often citing creative techniques enabling agents to verify the correctness of their work In the late 2000s, I always knew I was talking to a solid programmer if their first question upon being handed a complex task was to ask, "how will we test this?" Agile developers learned back then that literally everything hinged on establishing a fast, reliable, automated way to verify your code fulfilled its intended purpose. Without tests, you can't refactor aggressively, deploy frequently, or delete safely. Over the 2010s, many of us learned patterns and heuristics that allowed us to take shortcuts and tone down our testing zeal in the name of pragmatism and efficiency, but the underlying skill of concocting ways to verify our code never stopped being valuable. Well, here we are again. In 2025, the only thing that matters when it comes to coding agents like Claude Code and Codex CLI is to ensure they are equipped with the tools they need to independently verify the correctness of their work.

When half the websites I visited wouldn't load this morning, I figured I'd check downdetector (https://downdetector.com) to see if Cloudflare was down, but I couldn't. Because Cloudflare was down. Distributed systems sound great, but the way the industry rushed to crown a handful of winners like AWS and Cloudflare had the net effect of merely increasing the number of single points of failure in the chain.

I've wanted to start listening to books for Japanese practice in addition to just reading them, but the lack of an easy way to quickly understand a particular word always limited my ability to understand and enjoy it. With iOS 26, the Live Captions Accessibility feature can be set to a number of languages (including Japanese) and routed to the system audio instead of the microphone. So while Amazon would be happy to sell you a "Whisper" license for both audiobook and ebook in order to get a less useful version of this functionality, your iOS device can just passively be building a transcript of the book for you to review as you listen. There's even a "Copy Transcript" button in the top right corner of the expanded view!

Fun little demo of this weekend's project. I recently shipped Becky a way to ship auto-expiring stories from Beckygram (https://beckygram.com) that would in turn syndicate to Instagram via POSSE Party (https://posseparty.com), which was pretty straightforward since her site is an actual honest-to-god Rails app. But justin.searls.co is a static site with no backend component. I accomplished the same thing by creating a new media type for the blog called "wisps". What you're looking at in this demo: