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:

What are the odds?* *The odds are 1 in 1.7 million

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu say we'll have to wait to see a sequel to iPhone Air, but The Information provides literally nothing beyond this headline (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-delays-release-next-iphone-air-amid-weak-sales) outside their paywall: Apple Delays Release of Next iPhone Air Amid Weak Sales But does one truly need to fork over $399 to know exactly what the body of the article is going to say? All you need to know is that Justin Searls loving an Apple product is effectively the kiss of death in the Tim Cook era:

I'm back and I'm angry. My power went out, which caused my Internet to go down, which broke my favorite mug. And that's just the shit that happened before 7 AM. By 9 AM my doorbell was continuously chiming for no fucking reason. Join me in the struggle. We shall persevere. Tell me how your morning went by writing in to: podcast@searls.co. Here 4 U:

Fantastic write-up by Nowfal (https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era) comparing AI's current moment to the Internet's dial-up era. This bit in particular points to a cleavage that far too few people understand: Software presents an even more interesting question. How many apps do you need? What about software that generates applications on demand, that creates entire software ecosystems autonomously? Until now, handcrafted software was the constraint. Expensive software engineers and their our labor costs limited what companies could afford to build. Automation changes this equation by making those engineers far more productive. Both consumer and enterprise software markets suggest significant unmet demand because businesses have consistently left projects unbuilt. They couldn't justify the development costs or had to allocate limited resources to their top priority projects. I saw this firsthand at Amazon. Thousands of ideas went unfunded not because they lacked business value, but because of the lack of engineering resources to build them. If AI can produce software at a fraction of the cost, that unleashes enormous latent demand. The key question then is if and when that demand will saturate.