Breaking Change

By Justin SearlsTechnology

Breaking Change episodes

September 02, 2025v43 - The Slop Economy
Remember it is your civic duty to e-mail me at [email protected]. As of this episode, that address is monitored by Fastmail, so there's a higher probability I'll actually get your e-mail!
Some links you won't click:
Why I-4 is the most dangerous highway in America
The Beak and the Barrel
Sign up for Fastmail. It is good.
The Gilroy Order
Making ChatGPT doubt itself
Why I wasn't cut out for management
How to comment on my blog
Aaron's puns, ranked
New Xcode beta adds GPT-5, Claude account support
Apple Responds to Accusations of Jay Blahnik Creating 'Toxic Workplace'
4chan Refuses To Pay UK Online Safety Act Fines
Americans' junk-filled garages are hurting EV adoption, study says
New Book Argues Hybrid Schedules 'Don't Work', Return-to-Office Brings Motivation and Learning
Shenmue 3 is getting an Enhanced edition
Raguelike game may portend AI disruption in the gaming industry
Making cash off 'AI slop': The surreal video business taking over the web (News+)
Stellantis shelves Level 3 driver-assistance program that totally works and has no problems
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says AI enabled him to cut 4,000 jobs
Timeline Japan: 1980
Perfect Days
Rental Family
Black Mirror Season 7
Yumtein Gummy Bears
Listener Björn made this Equaliteam app
2 hr 36 min
August 27, 2025v42.0.1 - Scott Werner: Ignore all previous instructions
🔥Hotfix🔥 is back with a new guest! Scott Werner is the CEO of Sublayer, helps organize the Artificial Ruby meetup in NYC, and is the author of the extremely well-named (and well-written) Substack, Works on my Machine.
In this conversation, we jointly grapple with WTF is happening to programming as a career. Did the unprecedented peacetime the software industry experienced from 2005-2022 make us all soft? Is the era of code-writing agents fundamentally changing the nature of the job? Should we be less like DHH/Matz and more like why the lucky stiff?
We'd love to get your feedback to [email protected] — I'll read it all and flag relevant questions and comments for the next Breaking Change.
You can follow Scott Werner online at:
Works on my Machine on Substack
@scottwernerd on Twitter/X
A handful of things we mentioned:
There's no AI in Team
The Goal book
Lean Thinking vs Fat Thinking (a newsletter that draws a different lesson from The Goal)
why the lucky stiff (aka "_why")
That fireside chat between Matz and DHH
Sublayer's product, APM (Actions Per Minute)
1 hr 48 min
August 16, 2025v42 - Free as in Remodel
Thanks for writing so many lovely emails to [email protected]. Hell, thanks even for the unlovely ones.
Be sure to look out for me showing up on Dead Code at some point after it records next Tuesday. I'm realizing not all podcasts have a 1-hour-or-less turnaround time like this one does.
As promised, some URLs follow:
Want a Japanese girlfriend? Better be the right Myers-Briggs type
Aaron's puns, ranked
Men sucking at chores is turning women gay! (News+)
Nightmares kill you (Archive)
This shiner from /r/overemployed
Hour of Code is now Hour of AI
Gary Marcus taking a few victory laps around GPT-5
OpenAI caves to 4o-pilled users
Meta's AI rules have let bots hold 'sensual' chats with children
Apple returns blood oxygen monitoring to the latest Apple Watches (sort of)
The Trump Trophy
My man Steve Wozniak has a 6-digit /. account
Enough
Andor
Alien: Earth
Sims 2 Legacy Collection
Foundation Season 3
Mariusz schools us on running Claude Code in a Docker container (sources)
Marick's ZIRP reply and my follow-up post
3 hr 14 min
August 03, 2025v41 - Liquid Glasshole
I've made it! I'm over the hump! I'm actually writing* my language-learning app in Swift!
Send an email expressing how proud you are of me to [email protected]. Or if there's any news worth following that isn't about AI. Too much AI stuff lately.
*And by "I'm writing", I admit Claude Code is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
Hyperlinks:
Girlfriend Reviews of Mario Kart World
Mario Paint 2 for Nintendo Switch 2
Ben publishes NSScreencast, not NSCoder 🤦‍♂️
claude-discord-bridge
Speeding up your Xcode tests
Upside-down development
There is no AI in Team
Aaron's puns, ranked
7/24 - WaPo: This app lets women review their dates. Men are worried. (Apple News+)
7/25 - 404 Media: Tea hack exposed. Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan
Security Breach at Tea Worsens, Revealing Users' DMs About Abortions and Cheating
Tokyo prostitution ring members who targeted foreigners arrested
Somebody's remaking Rebel Assault in UE5
Battlestar Galactica writer Ronald D Moore is showrunning God of War
AppleCare One is a good deal
Apple CEO Tim Cook Tells Staff AI Is 'Ours to Grab' in Pep Talk
Thanks for Your $1 Billion Job Offer, Mark Zuckerberg. I'm Gonna Pass (Apple News+)
Steve Krouse with a great tech debt analogy
Christina Wodtke on what it means that early-days web developers are pumped about AI
Orta: Six weeks of claude code
System prompt updates to Claude 4 Opus tries to ward off mania
Foundation Season 3
Halt and Catch Fire
Saw that Family Guy musical, Music Man
opencode.ai
2 hr 17 min
July 19, 2025v40 - Go home Claude, you're drunk
Finally, a recommendation-heavy, full-mailbag show. Been a while.
New to the pod are achievements—watch your BreakingScore™ increase each time you write in to [email protected]. The winner will receive nothing, probably.
Lynx:
Coke BlāK
My Full-breadth developers post
When I discovered Claude is working for the weekend
My latest newsletter that admits why I haven't started yet
Aaron's puns, ranked
Note taking AI is outnumbering participants on meetings
Arkane founder slams Xbox Game Pass
An unsubsidized Xbox could just do the special offers like Kindle, IMO
Eyeball Dynamic Range
FaceTime in iOS 26 will freeze your call if someone starts undressing
xOS 26 betas expected on July 23
'Vibe Coder' Who Doesn't Know How to Code Keeps Winning Hackathons in San Francisco
'Coding is dead': UW computer science program rethinks curriculum for the AI era
OpenAI's Windsurf deal is off — and Windsurf's CEO is going to Google
Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code — without telling users
Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy
People with higher cognitive ability have weaker moral foundations
The Remarkable life of Ibelin
Halt and catch fire
Doom: The Dark Ages
As Dusk Falls
To The Moon
Superman (2025)
Expedition 33: Clair Obscur
The Yakult Swallow guy died
2 hr 34 min
July 13, 2025v39.0.1 - Dave Mosher: Use AI in Anger
Welcome to the first episode of 🔥Hotfix🔥! Breaking Change's first show-within-a-show, wherein I let somebody else talk for once. Each episode will show up as a patch release in the Breaking Change feed and feature guests with Hot takes about a relevant issue and a clear fix in mind for what we can do about it.
That first guest is a long-time collaborator and top 5 all-time colleague of mine named Dave Mosher, who's here to drop some truth bombs labeled "agentic coding" on the unsuspecting populace.
My secret mission on each of these is to lean into the show's E-for-explicit tag and try to get the guest to say something that could get them fired. I failed this time, but in fairness to me, Dave is Canadian.
We'd love to get your feedback to [email protected] — I'll read it all and flag relevant questions and comments for the next Breaking Change.
You can follow Dave Mosher online at:
GitHub
Twitter/X
Dave's personal blog
The Test Double blog
A handful of things we mentioned:
Full-breadth Developers
The "Double Loop" model to agentic coding
Simon Willison's blog
Claude Code
2 hr 19 min
June 30, 2025v39 - Broken Home
I have returned to the nation of freedom and tariffs and all my shit has stopped working! Which shit? Why? What did I buy now? Listen and find out.
Remember, listeners who write in to [email protected] will be spared on judgment day.
Website stuff follows:
Hirome Ichiba in Kochi City
Japan's ocean whirlpool (渦) boats
Indigo La End
POSSE Party
Tessie Tesla app
Aaron's puns, ranked
We finally may be able to rid the world of mosquitoes. But should we? (Archive link)
Supreme Court allows Texas online porn age verification law
Microsoft changes Windows in attempt to prevent next CrowdStrike-style catastrophe
As AI Infiltrates Call Centers, Human Workers Are Being Mistaken for Bots
AI and the Rise of Judgement Over Technical Skill
What Google Translate Can Tell Us About Vibecoding
The Meta AI app is a privacy disaster
MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
The DMA forced apple to make a B2B price-to-features chart
Apple Vision Series and Smart Glasses Roadmap (2025–2028)
Sky app
RIP Slide Over
Street Fighter Movie: Jason Momoa cast as Blanka, 50 Cent as Balrog
30-minute Outer Worlds 2 deep dive
Kojima uses Western actors b/c of our craggy, ugly fucking skin
Comcast says all its new plans have unlimited data
Pig movie
Moana 2 (but really Lava)
Witcher 4 + Unreal Engine 5 demo
Death Stranding 2 is better as a video review
Andor Season 2
Wrexham S4
Philips EP4444 coffee thing
2 hr 43 min
June 06, 2025v38 - Searls HQ2
Spoiler alert: I'm in the same country as I was for v37, but this time from a different nondescript business hotel. Also: I have good personal news! And, as usual, bad news news. I don't get to pick the headlines though, I just read them.
This episode comes with a homework assignment. First, watch Apple's keynote at 10 AM pacific on June 9th. Second, e-mail [email protected] with all your takes. I'd love your help by informing me where my head should be at when I show up on the Changelog next week.
And now, fewer links than usual:
The movie 父と僕の終わらない歌
Fukushima
The Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum
Utsunomiya
Fukui
I got spicy about LLM neophytes
Aaron's puns, ranked
Entry-level tech hiring is down 50%
AI Role in College Brings Education Closer to a Crisis Point
Veo 3 marks the beginning of the end times (watch this supercut)
If you're having an affair, don't use Claude
Apple's turning it up to 26
My theory on what 2027's "all-glass" iPhone is really all about
Nobody uses semicolons; they're pointless
2 hr 52 min
May 22, 2025v37 - Whose bone is this?
Coming to you LIVE from a third straight week of Japanese business hotels comes me, Justin, in his enduring quest to figure out how to exchange currency for real estate in the land of the rising fun.
[Programming note: apologies, as the audio quality at the beginning of the podcast suffered because I fucked up and left the hotel room's air conditioner on (I caught it and fixed it from the pun section onward)]
Had a few great e-mails to read through this week, but now I'm fresh out again! Before you listen, why not write in a review of this episode? [email protected] and tell me about how amazing it will be before it lets you down like your best friend and/or workplace mentor and/or parent figure.
Href time:
Craigmod's Kissa by Kissa book
@koic works on RuboCop and inspired this issue of my Searls of Wisdom newsletter
In Japan, you're not a BDFL, you're a 優しい終身の独裁者
Speaking of newsletters, this month's took me way too damn long
All the prefectures I've been to so far (36 as of v37)
The US Embassy in Japan's 10" x 10" bag limit
Aaron's puns, ranked
CRISPR babies! (Archive)
GTA 6's trailer
SteamOS is one step closer to being real
Fortnite is back on iOS
CarPlay Ultra is nice, but will it scale?
visionOS 3 will let us scroll with our eyeballs
Apple is considering an AI-based search tool for iOS
Rumor: iOS 19 will let developers invoke its on-board local models
Sam + Jony, sitting in a tree / pile of cash
ChatGPT Diminishes Idea Diversity in Brainstorming, Study Finds
Microsoft Engineers forced to dig their own AI graves
muscle-mem solves a huge issue with "agentic" programs
Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational
Chicago Sun-Times Prints Summer Reading List Full of Fake Books
mid college towns are screwed (News+)
The Quiet Collapse of Surveys: Fewer Humans (and More AI Agents) Are Answering Survey Questions
The Nomad Universal Cable
Junglia Okinawa opens in July and this ad is absolutely bonkers
Saw the Yakult Swallows with Tatsuhiko Miyagawa from Rebuild.fm
Loved World Order's new single until the guy got milkshake duck'd 5 minutes later
This Workforce AI promo video is peak smug AI hustler shit
The Bechdel Test (not to be confused with the Becky Test)
2 hr 36 min
April 30, 2025v36 - Hedgelord
I'm going away on a trip for an unexpectedly long time, and you'll never guess why! (You might guess why.) Anyway, here's something to remember me by.
If you've ever been worried about whether something you cared about would work out okay, email [email protected] and tell me about it so that I can share your story with a bunch of strangers on the Internet.
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
References available upon request:
Nobody knows how to turn on Vision Pro
I released a new gem called searls-auth
Aaron's puns, ranked
CodeWeavers' founder's gracious post, Whisky's Legacy, and the Spirit it Leaves Behind
DeX for iPhones? Finally!
A menu bar for iPads? Finally!
Backblaze: the only subsidized startup pricing schemes left are the fraudulent ones!
Russia moves to seize World of Tanks developer over Ukraine support
Amazon To Display Tariff Costs For Consumers, Report Says (Update: They Won't)
Meta's Digital Companions want to have sex with you (News+)
OpenAI's chat bot will tell you that you're really good at sex
But they're fixing it
But Reddit fixed it better
Someone made an AI better by having it argue with itself, just like humans do
Coding competitions are dead and gone forever
The Coravin Pivot wine preservation system is great
So is this pool skimmer robot that I talked about last week but forgot about and am talking about again
A book! Landed: Japan. Everything you may not need to know about buying real estate
2 hr 24 min

About Breaking Change

From the publisher's feed

A show in which Justin Searls talks with you from time to time. Programmer things. Apple stuff. Gaming news. Dispatches from Disney World. Each episode also entitles the listener to one (1) exclusive…