Time to renew Kagi Search. I’m on the starter tier. Upon examination, I’m doing about 45 searches per month. The trend is decreasing. I use their Article Summarizer on the iPad and iPhone much more often. I want to support them because I believe we need diversity when it comes to searching the web. But it’s not cheap, and my search requests trend is going downward, thanks to AI. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Any Kagi users in the room?

I always feel like I’m losing the time-saving benefits if I spend time improving an automation (an Apple Shortcut, for example). 🤦🏻‍♂️

Thinking out loud here: one way Apple could retain more talent could be to start innovating again, maybe? 1

  1. Recent departures to OpenAI, a company working on a new class of devices might doing just that: trying to innovate for real. ↩︎

I spent the last few days putting together a workflow to help me write those year-in-review articles. As we get closer to the end of the year, it’s the right time to start working on this. I documented my workflow in this Craft document and submitted to the #winter_challenge on Slack. Hint: my first real use case for MCP.

On Tony Fadell For Apple's New CEO

Parker Ortolani on taking a chance of Tony Fadell to replace Tim Cook. At first, Tony Fadell seems like the obvious candidate, but I worry that we may be under the spell of a certain nostalgia in thinking he would be the perfect choice, as Parker points out. The world is no longer what it was in the days of Steve Jobs and his close collaborators. Apple is no longer what it once was either, and that is partly what many people criticize the company for. John Ternus is a product engineer, not a designer, and putting design back at the center of the process as it was in the Steve Jobs era may be a more restorative idea—and in that sense, yes, perhaps Fadell would be a good choice.

Rant on. I’m judging on facts and acts, not with what someone says. Some people might defend web openness et al, but sharing on x.com in 2025 because it’s the place most people go is not an act of openness. It’s an act of contribution toward fascism. Stop pretending, people, don’t be lazy, stop taking shortcuts and leave x.com once and for all. Rant off.

I don’t really believe in vibe coding, especially the scaling of it for complex systems, even more for maintaining code. But I certainly wish I could use vibe coding to write Apple Shortcuts. Apple must do something about its Shortcuts editor. It’s cumbersome, buggy as hell. Having a textual representation, a la Apple Script, would be so cool.

Louie Mantia on Steve Lemay:

I don’t have much to say about Steve Lemay. He was the hiring manager for my first interview at Apple fifteen years ago. It didn’t work out, and I went to work on iTunes and iLife instead. But he had already been at Apple for a long time, and I have lots of respect for him for his platform knowledge and expertise. I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership. I wish him the best.

What we’re going to see from Apple in the next twelve months is probably set in stone (except Siri or Apple Intelligence, maybe). I don’t expect a revolution in that short time frame.

Think Different

I understand the enthusiasm for AI among certain groups of workers, especially in the field of information technology and more specifically software development. However, I believe that caution is necessary for most other categories of employment. Enthusiasm cannot simply be transferred systematically and literally to every domain, whether technological or not. Contexts differ greatly, professions are highly diverse, and even small variations in requirements can reduce the applicability of AI to nearly zero. We should remain critical of this overflow of passion and the promised revolution; by doing so, we might help avoid the potential bubble that increasingly seems to be forming right under our noses.