

Breaking Change
Justin Searls
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 pun, care of of Aaron Patterson (aka @tenderlove). Submit questions and comments to podcast@searls.co
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jul 13, 2025 • 2h 18min
v39.0.1 - 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 podcast@searls.co — 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
 

Jun 30, 2025 • 2h 43min
v39 - 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 podcast@searls.co 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
 

Jun 6, 2025 • 2h 51min
v38 - 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 podcast@searls.co 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
 

May 22, 2025 • 2h 35min
v37 - 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? podcast@searls.co 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)
 

Apr 30, 2025 • 2h 24min
v36 - 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 podcast@searls.co 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
 

Apr 20, 2025 • 2h 35min
v35 - GPT Casserole
 Your favorite podcast about nothing continues to find things to talk about.
Whatever you do, DO NOT e-mail me at podcast@searls.co or else I will read it on air and tell everyone how smart you sound and how good you look.
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
Links to follow:
Loving my Tariffmas gifts: external SSD array and pool skimmer, especially
My first taste of GitHub Copilot's Agent mode 
Me putting Agent mode to the test in a fun little screencast
Aaron's puns, ranked
Videogame consoles like the Switch 2 are NOT exempt from tariffs
Digital Foundry's technical analysis of Mario Kart World
The stunning Marathon cinematic trailer
Star Wars Zero Company is the X-Com game I want
Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals
A bunch of Vision hardware leaks and rumors: 1, 2, 3, 4
People at Apple were calling the AI/ML group AIMLess, lol
React Native might not be as popular as you think
Boarding passes and check-in could be scrapped in air travel shake-up
Incredible plot to print every single possible ticket to win the Texas lotto
A Lack of Intelligence, Not Training, May Be Why People Struggle With Computers
AI models still struggle to debug software, Microsoft study shows
LLM bots + Next.js bankrupting people who design their sites badly
Apps are being paid to install frameworks that sell users' bandwidth to proxy providers for AI scrapers
OpenAI o3 and o4-mini announced (they also hallucinate more)
GPT 4.1 is better at coding
Codex CLI is OpenAI's answer to Claude Code
Extremely long read: OpenAI is a Systemic Risk to the Tech Industry
GPS magnetic quantum is 50x more accurate and unjammable
The Gorge is good but takes a sharp left turn into horror town
I went to Epic Universe and have opinions
 

Apr 6, 2025 • 3h 10min
v34 - Bait and Switch 2
 Nothing like a peaceful Sunday morning at the end of an exhausting, historically-volatile week to pour a hot cup of coffee and spew absolutely scalding takes in all directions. If you get burned, don't say I didn't warn you. Read the message on the lid.
We've done 34 of these now and my mailbag is getting full of old e-mails that don't make sense anymore. Please email new stuff to me at podcast@searls.co and we, like civilization, will start fresh next time!
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
You can read more about things on other websites below:
My "new" podcast, Merge Commits
Announcing TLDR 1.0
Late to the party on this: it's good that Siri is bubbling up to Craig, finally
Aaron's puns, ranked
Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine
OpenAI releases 4o Image Generation
ChatGPT Users Are Creating Studio Ghibli-Style AI Images
How OpenAI's Ghibli Frenzy Took a Dark Turn Real Fast (Archive)
An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
Go to Truant Studio for all your branding and advertising needs
Anthropic released their research into how LLMs "think"
The 500 million worker problem
India's domestic stock bubble
Remember 15 years ago when we cared who would buy TikTok? Amazon might, still
Eddie Burback's "No Phone" video
College students are worse now, says professor, as always
Ubisoft reportedly has lawyers ready to fight Assassin's Creed Shadows harassment
Nintendo just carried out a major test of its reach in a post-Twitter world
The Nintendo Switch 2 Direct
Virtual Game Cards
By "anti-scalping", they meant "for Japan"
Third-party developers say Switch 2's horsepower makes them 'extremely happy'
Switch backwards compatibility is emulation
Nintendo delays US preorders because tariffs
Saturday Night film
Titanic
Still playing Avowed
Not playing Inzoi
How to change the oil on a Tesla
Roguelike/Starfoxlike, Whisker Squadron: Survivor
How SNL manages cue cards
 

Mar 15, 2025 • 2h 58min
v33 - Apathetic Intelligence
 I hope you ordered your podcast spicy, because this version is a slow heat, but it builds. I was pretty fired up by the end of this one. If I crossed a line here, please report it to HR at podcast@searls.co and they will conduct an investigation.
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
I tossed this bouquet of URLs in the air but no one caught them:
Tailwind 4 Upgrades
Aaron's puns, ranked
There's a new cringey Star Fox-like coming
Shenmue 1 & 2 mixed up the axial tilt
Secret Agent Wizard Boy and the International Crime Syndicate
The history of 3DFX
The first portable Xbox could hit shelves this year
Steam Decard VR thing could also be coming
Tim Sweeney's been Elon-pilled
Is Tesla Cooked?
Cybertruck panels are flying every which way
SpaceX's Starship is fucked, apparently
Why LLMs aren't like Einstein
LLM refuses to code
No one knows what the hell an agent is
crmne/ruby_llm is a new Ruby gem for interacting with LLMs
Vision Pro let this guy see in 3D
iOS 19 will overhaul the system UI
Live translation is coming to iOS 19 (sort of)
RCS is getting End-to-End Encryption Between Android and iOS
Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation really is
iPhone 17 Ultra may be coming
Google bricked Chromecast
Mozilla bricked Firefoxes
Microsoft bricked a bazillion PCs
Meta is run by a human brick
China bricked the field of public health
Stay tuned to Changelog next week - I'll be on it!
Shogun - where the Japanese speak period-appropriate Japanese and the Portugese speak modern British English
Avowed - the best damn game I've played in a long-ass time
There's a new Vision Pro strap-on in town
Star Trek Enterprise was good, actually
Allstate's human engineers screwed up so the LLMs wouldn't have to
AI Snipd is a podcast player
 

Mar 3, 2025 • 2h 11min
v32 - Large Lemon Model
 Turns out I'd accidentally been letting some of your e-mail get filtered as junk mail. I want to be clear that I don't think you're junk, Apple does. Write in with your feelings to podcast@searls.co and I'll read it, assuming I get it.
Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.
Without further ado, links!
POSSE Party
Aaron's puns, ranked
Don't invite anyone you like to a measles party
Sorry vegans, plants can feel pain
Reddit will add a paywall
Junior developers know how to code even less than usual
GPT 4.5 is a lemon 🍋
Insecure code is how you get Nazis
Ben AI shows off how the hustle bros are thriving with AI
This is the video I'd share with friends and family to explain AI
Mostly non-AI reasons the job market is frozen
Hacking your Eight Sleep to frustrate fascism
Apple pulls encryption from island that famously likes surveilling people
A Vision Pro app is coming to iPhone
Apple debuts iPhone 16e
Is Apple's first cell modem maybe better than we expected?
In 18.4, Apple Maps finally adds a language setting
Spatial AI assistants with Sidekick for Vision Pro
Shoresy is back for Season 4
Avowed is a good game
 

Feb 16, 2025 • 2h 58min
v31 - Full Searls Driving
 Update: This is the first version of Breaking Change available in 4K video. Check it out on YouTube.
The one where Justin picks the perfect time to buy his first Tesla vehicle.
Sometimes the things I say and do make people feel things. Share those feelings with me at this e-mail address: podcast@searls.co. Whatever you're feeling, I'll read it and do my best to acknowledge it. I also
may read it on air. Unless you ask me not to, in which case I won't.
Okay, so anyway, there are links to be lunked:
The RuboCop pull request I referenced having talked about in this month's newsletter
The Space Black Firanto paint I tried to use to heal my M4 MacBook Pro
The little travel router that I'm using strictly for my Vision Pro
Sponsored content: you too can have bad timing when you buy a new Tesla with my link and get $2500 off, apparently.
Aaron's puns, ranked
The ESA announces new "iicon" event after running E3 into the ground
Apple finally lets you migrate purchases to a different Apple ID
Prediction: iOS 19 features a new UI toolkit that looks a lot like visionOS and this new Invites app
Google eliminates the woker half of its holidays calendar
TikTok is so back, baby
Netflix is connected to the Apple TV app! (lol, psyche!)
What the WikTok story can teach us about programmers' future job prospects. (Not much)
Gaudy Jeep ads are ruining Stellantis's terrible reputation
Godzilla Minus One: Two is coming
Even Disney is worried about the high cost of Disney
A major visionOS 2.4 update is around the corner (Archive link)
A youtube essay about "work games"
Tape to Tape is hockey videogaming at its finest
Yakuza: Like a Dragon's business management minigame is all I need.
I also needed Alien: Romulus, though
 


