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Fallthrough Media

Fallthrough

A Technology podcast

#166 in Technology · 🇲🇽
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About the show

A deep and nuanced conversational podcast focused on technology, software, and computing.

Newest episodes

The Good, the Bad, and the Sloppy

55 min

We all love a duo episode, but this week's duo isn't Kris and Matt, it's Kris and Nick! Yes, after joining us last week as a guest, Nick Gerace of East River Source Control is back to join Kris. The two dig into the latest changes to the AI plans we've all come to love, what constitutes something actually being slop, and where in the loop humans belong. Nick is also apparently auditioning to become a Fallthrough co-host! Let us know your thoughts on that. In this episode, Nick argues that the frontier labs stay winning regardless of the strategy you pick, whether that's Oxide's human-centric approach or the software factory agent-centric approach. Meanwhile, Kris argues that Ghostty is definitely not "vibe-coded slop" while reminding everyone that most of the things we think we have stable definitions for we absolutely do not. The pair also discuss the origins of the term vibe coding, what's in Anthropic's S1, and why the collaborative infrastructure we built for humans works just as well for agents. We know you love that high-quality expanded content and we aim to please! In this week's supporter content we've got discussions about reducing single day multi-billion token usage down to something more reasonable, why Kris would rather listen to or read broken English over AI polish, a retrospective on Gas Town, the unique ways in which Opus 5 was awful, and why Apple still might be the dark horse when it comes to local AI. Haven't had a taste of expanded content yet? Get yours today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe and signing up today! You'll get bonus content in both our shows and higher quality audio-only editions. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/x6RlwY4t4-w. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: If This Is the Formal Job Offer (00:01:59)Chapter 2: A Bit of Churn in Our AI Plans (00:04:55)Chapter 4: The Shock Factor of Ongoing Change (00:11:26...

A Change Is Gonna Come

1 hr 7 min

We've got Nick Gerace back! Last time he was on he was at System Initiative, but now he's joined our very own Steve Klabnik at East River Source Control! Kris and Matt catch up with Nick on the move from one startup to another, what it's been like building beyond Git, and the consequences of our industry optimizing for speed over everything else. Nick dives into why ERSC is betting hard on monorepos and why their platform is centered around changes and not pull requests. The trio then discusses the importance of not allowing LLMs to co-author commits, how and why software is getting worse over time, and the nonsense that is the industry paying 300% to hire someone new rather than give someone a 30% raise that's already employed. If you're a fan of long and deep discussions, then this episode's expanded edition is absolutely for you! Available to our supporters, the trio digs deep into a variety of topics. Kris argues that Git in its creator's eye is a full VCS in the same way the Linux kernel is a full operating system and that Git and Go share a history of people misunderstanding what it means to be decentralized. The trio discuss the prioritization of free features and usage that has led to many of GitHub's stability problems. Along the way they make a pit stop at why you shouldn't believe that aliens helped build the pyramids if you don't believe they helped build your cellphone and whether local dev is dead. What's that? You're not a supporter yet and you want to listen to that extra hour of content? You can fix that by going to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe and becoming a supporter today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/d_KB6n3RkXA. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Not From a Shure SM7B (00:01:37)Chapter...

The Tortoise and the Agent

1 hr 12 min

On this week's episode, Kris and Matt are joined by Fred Hebert and Reid Savage from Honeycomb to talk discuss building products with tiny teams, why code reviews are a useful bottleneck that we should keep around, and how AI mandates make a mistake in risk management. Fred discusses how his team uses vibe-coding to create false work that gets a new product standing on its own. Then the panel discusses having forgiving environments, why production isn't great place to learn, ensuring that worst case scenarios aren't avoided, and why the best use of AI is for personal tooling, not the stuff your team uses. Do you hear that? Yes! That is the sound of supporter content! This week that includes Fred's admission that AI has made his life as an engineer worse, Reid's argument for why managers are definitely sticking around, why we're still going to be buying technology instead of just vibe coding it, and Fred and Reid's must-read book list. Not a supporter yet? Become one today by going to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe, you'll get extra content in Fallthrough, bonus discussions in Continue, and higher quality audio-only editions! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/m52ef550Fpg. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Team Tenant: Don't Be a Poison Pill for SaaS (00:00:47)Chapter 2: False Work: We Pretend That Releases Work (00:02:31)Chapter 3: Meant to Be Thrown Away (00:05:54)Chapter 7: Vocal Critics Because They're Heavy Users (00:07:36)Chapter 8: Substrates of Different Speeds (00:09:46)Chapter 9: Dogfood, Kibble, and a Forgiving Environment (00:13:02)Chapter 10: I Can't Build on This (00:15:07)Chapter 11: Prod Is the Worst Time to Learn (00:18:21)Chapter 12: Blocking Because It's Important (00:21:44)Chapter 13: Five Teams...

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All episodes

The newest 50 of 107 episodes

The Good, the Bad, and the Sloppy

55 min

We all love a duo episode, but this week's duo isn't Kris and Matt, it's Kris and Nick! Yes, after joining us last week as a guest, Nick Gerace of East River Source Control is back to join Kris. The two dig into the latest changes to the AI plans we've all come to love, what constitutes something actually being slop, and where in the loop humans belong. Nick is also apparently auditioning to become a Fallthrough co-host! Let us know your thoughts on that. In this episode, Nick argues that the frontier labs stay winning regardless of the strategy you pick, whether that's Oxide's human-centric approach or the software factory agent-centric approach. Meanwhile, Kris argues that Ghostty is definitely not "vibe-coded slop" while reminding everyone that most of the things we think we have stable definitions for we absolutely do not. The pair also discuss the origins of the term vibe coding, what's in Anthropic's S1, and why the collaborative infrastructure we built for humans works just as well for agents. We know you love that high-quality expanded content and we aim to please! In this week's supporter content we've got discussions about reducing single day multi-billion token usage down to something more reasonable, why Kris would rather listen to or read broken English over AI polish, a retrospective on Gas Town, the unique ways in which Opus 5 was awful, and why Apple still might be the dark horse when it comes to local AI. Haven't had a taste of expanded content yet? Get yours today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe and signing up today! You'll get bonus content in both our shows and higher quality audio-only editions. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/x6RlwY4t4-w. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: If This Is the Formal Job Offer (00:01:59)Chapter 2: A Bit of Churn in Our AI Plans (00:04:55)Chapter 4: The Shock Factor of Ongoing Change (00:11:26...

A Change Is Gonna Come

1 hr 7 min

We've got Nick Gerace back! Last time he was on he was at System Initiative, but now he's joined our very own Steve Klabnik at East River Source Control! Kris and Matt catch up with Nick on the move from one startup to another, what it's been like building beyond Git, and the consequences of our industry optimizing for speed over everything else. Nick dives into why ERSC is betting hard on monorepos and why their platform is centered around changes and not pull requests. The trio then discusses the importance of not allowing LLMs to co-author commits, how and why software is getting worse over time, and the nonsense that is the industry paying 300% to hire someone new rather than give someone a 30% raise that's already employed. If you're a fan of long and deep discussions, then this episode's expanded edition is absolutely for you! Available to our supporters, the trio digs deep into a variety of topics. Kris argues that Git in its creator's eye is a full VCS in the same way the Linux kernel is a full operating system and that Git and Go share a history of people misunderstanding what it means to be decentralized. The trio discuss the prioritization of free features and usage that has led to many of GitHub's stability problems. Along the way they make a pit stop at why you shouldn't believe that aliens helped build the pyramids if you don't believe they helped build your cellphone and whether local dev is dead. What's that? You're not a supporter yet and you want to listen to that extra hour of content? You can fix that by going to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe and becoming a supporter today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/d_KB6n3RkXA. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Not From a Shure SM7B (00:01:37)Chapter...

The Tortoise and the Agent

1 hr 12 min

On this week's episode, Kris and Matt are joined by Fred Hebert and Reid Savage from Honeycomb to talk discuss building products with tiny teams, why code reviews are a useful bottleneck that we should keep around, and how AI mandates make a mistake in risk management. Fred discusses how his team uses vibe-coding to create false work that gets a new product standing on its own. Then the panel discusses having forgiving environments, why production isn't great place to learn, ensuring that worst case scenarios aren't avoided, and why the best use of AI is for personal tooling, not the stuff your team uses. Do you hear that? Yes! That is the sound of supporter content! This week that includes Fred's admission that AI has made his life as an engineer worse, Reid's argument for why managers are definitely sticking around, why we're still going to be buying technology instead of just vibe coding it, and Fred and Reid's must-read book list. Not a supporter yet? Become one today by going to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe, you'll get extra content in Fallthrough, bonus discussions in Continue, and higher quality audio-only editions! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/m52ef550Fpg. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Team Tenant: Don't Be a Poison Pill for SaaS (00:00:47)Chapter 2: False Work: We Pretend That Releases Work (00:02:31)Chapter 3: Meant to Be Thrown Away (00:05:54)Chapter 7: Vocal Critics Because They're Heavy Users (00:07:36)Chapter 8: Substrates of Different Speeds (00:09:46)Chapter 9: Dogfood, Kibble, and a Forgiving Environment (00:13:02)Chapter 10: I Can't Build on This (00:15:07)Chapter 11: Prod Is the Worst Time to Learn (00:18:21)Chapter 12: Blocking Because It's Important (00:21:44)Chapter 13: Five Teams...

Git Out

1 hr 39 min

Change is challenging but quite often the tools that we used to solve yesterday's problems are unfit for tomorrow's problems. In this episode, Kris and Matt are joined by Rain Paharia, one of Matt's colleagues at Oxide who is also the creator of cargo-nextest. The trio discuss version control, the most difficult problem of Rain's career, and the challenge of rigor in an age when it's becoming cheaper than ever. Rain brings their knowledge from a decade at Meta to our ongoing discussion of jj, git, and why version control systems are so much better at the big tech companies. The trio discusses their gripes with GitHub, including some fresh perspectives from Rain on GitHub's attempts to fix issues (including some awkwardness with how Stacked PRs actually work). Then the conversation shifts to discussing how the team at Oxide managed to create an incremental updating system that works on air-gapped racks with hundreds of components. Along the way the trio also discuss API versioning and property based testing. You might be wondering where Kris' voice is in this episode? Well, he can certainly be heard in this weeks' supporter content! This week the expanded edition includes deep conversations about why LLMs got better at code but worse at prose, why Rain doesn't allow LLMs to write comments, LLMs as cliche machines, and some discussion of our favorite topic, Go modules. Are you not a supporter yet? You should fix that! Head on over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe and sign up today. You'll get expanded content in Fallthrough, bonus discussions in Continue, and higher quality audio-only editions. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/C-xkusj-uvc. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Meet Rain Paharia (00:01:39)Chapter 2: Three Months Without Telling Anyone (00:03:21)Chapter 3: JJ for Git Refugees (00:05:49)Chapter 4: Simpler and More Powerful (00:09:17)Chapter 5: Agents...

Close Encounters of the Human Kind

1 hr 7 min

How should we spend our time now that writing code is cheap? In this episode, Kris and Matt are joined by Doug Soo, a staff engineer working on the storage systems at Honeycomb. They discuss his blog post Spend More Time Talking to Humans, how AI is changing software development, and how that affects the way we communicate. The trio go from hedging the claim that we trust the output of compilers so we should trust the output of agents, how correcting LLMs can lead to exhaustion with little benefit, the ways in which decision making has become the core job of software engineers, how change can be actively bad, and the difference between optimism and hope. For our wonderful supporters we have an expanded edition! In this week's expanded content we have advice on how to reconcile AI with your career, regardless of whether you're just getting started or if you've been doing this for 30 years; an MIT class that shaped the way Doug thinks; how to tell if you actually enjoy implementation and which implementation skills matter; and Kris' prediction that the era of agents is coming to an end. Not a supporter yet? You can fix that right now by going to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe and signing up today. You'll get expanded editions of Fallthrough, bonus content in our other podcasts, and higher quality audio-only editions. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/kMo8aazKPCc. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Spend More Time Talking to Humans (00:01:26)Chapter 2: Who I Am and How I Got Here (00:03:34)Chapter 3: Your Users Are Twofold (00:05:04)Chapter 4: One to Two Weeks, One to Two Minutes (00:09:06)Chapter 5: Trust Was Earned (00:12:52)Chapter 6: Just Another Tool (00:15:34)Chapter 7: Faster, But Not Better (00...

Keep Your Enemies Closer

1 hr 16 min

Steve is back! He joins Kris and Matt to discuss the drama around DHH's latest keynote at Rails World and Steve's latest views on AI. Interestingly, Steve believes that he'll sit in opposition to how Kris and Matt see the current situation. We start with Steve giving us the long backstory of Rails and DHH. The trio then dives into a conversation about purity tests, whether you can learn from people you dislike, and why making Linux a viable third option for desktop environments is important. From there they dive into whether the agents that carried out hacks were actually told to do that, whether alignment is about intent or obedience, and whether it's better to be worried about Skynet now or later. Hilariously, during this conversation, Steve's AI personal assistant texts him during the recording, bringing up a deeper conversation about AI personal assistants and how much information we should actually give them. Supporter only content? But of course! This week the panel digs into whether AI agents are basically hammers, why agents make native apps economically viable, Kris' argument that the literacy crisis poses a much larger and more existential risk than AI, the ways in which the pronunciation trend on TikTok is weird classism, and what happens when Jev played the trolley problem. Not a supporter yet? You can fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you can sign up to gain access to extra content in our podcasts and higher quality audio-only editions. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0Rdd1RZx-t4. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: A Thing Called RailsConf (00:02:38)Chapter 2: This Is David at DavidConf (00:07:51)Chapter 3: A Purity Spiral (00:11:48)Chapter 6: This Guy Sucks, Therefore He Must Be Wrong (00:14:26)Chapter 7: A Quintessential Purity Test (00:20:09)Chapter 8: A Third Option for the Desktop (00:23:00)Chapter 9: Thi...

Thinking, Fast and Cheap

1 hr 8 min

Another week, another duo episode, but this time around it's Dylan who's joining Kris! He brings a fresh perspective to the AI conversation  that Kris and Matt have been engaging in. The big question: is AI going to kill us all? Dylan thinks the odds are "astronomically small" and neither Kris nor him are going to lose sleep over the fear driven hype. The two are asking bigger questions: whether what language models are doing is thinking, why those who build these models in AI labs aren't actually the people who understand them the best, and whether TypeSafe AI's new Jev model is an LLM and what one can do with it. They touch on token maxxing, the increasing flood of AI slop, whether we can truly look at the code we ship, and as always why Kris is unbothered by nearly all of this. We've got supporter content, of course! In this week's content we include a discussion of what one can actually build with TypeSafe AI's Jev, why good and evil aren't useful categories, a candid conversation about policing from two somewhat opposing vantage points, why filling potholes isn't an ideology, and more. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xCtImPOmEzg. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Hyperbolic Claims Make for Good Headlines (00:01:49)Chapter 2: A Thousand Things Would Need to Happen (00:04:19)Chapter 3: A Glass of Water Sweats Too (00:07:07)Chapter 4: Too Much Science Fiction (00:10:57)Chapter 5: Pilots, Not Aerospace Engineers (00:12:43)Chapter 6: Computers Are Dumb (00:16:32)Chapter 7: Token Maxing Has Gotten Absurd (00:22:25)Chapter 8: Average General In...

Apocalypse Not Now

1 hr 3 min

Kris and Matthew have some more spicy and it's about the latest AI news cycle: a greater than ten percent chance that AI wipes out humanity inside a decade. Neither of them are worried about it, what does is why everyone else is so worried about it. Kris brings his usual devil's advocate perspective: a 10% chance of extinction is also a 90% chance of non-extinction. He then widens the field of view to the more full argument, which is that AI is the easiest thing for everyone to point at. Matt takes a different direction and takes the argument at face value and walks it forward, ending with him once again reminding everyone that he is a stanch supporter of the second amendment. In the end, the two settle on the wider issue, that we continually use proxies instead of understanding the actual underlying problems and ultimately that we need to build a world with fewer ceilings and more floors. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a more nuanced perspective on what mid 20th century America was actually like when it comes to wealth inequality, whether we are actually living through the worst time in history, why no one has a billion dollars in their checking account, why Gen Z needs to stop telling Millennials to retire, the importance of people having high agency, and more. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/s3Oz6RwkelQ. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: A 10 Percent Chance of Extinction (00:02:12)Chapter 2: Fear Mongering at Its Finest (00:05:25)Chapter 3: A Lack of Imagination (00:07:25)Chapter 4: Doing Real Time Journali...

The Elements of Slop

1 hr 0 min

Kris and Matthew have some feelings about AI they want to discuss. No, not about benchmarks or agents, but about the people using it to write things they should be plenty capable of writing themselves: the five paragraph LinkedIn post, the blog post, the tweet. Both Matt and Kris stumbled upon Pangram from the same source: Bryan Cantrill. The two go from there, discussing the ridiculousness of people writing short form posts fully with AI, to the purity tests that people insist on having, to the literacy crisis. This episode has a ton of spice, especially in the expanded edition. Speaking of the Expanded edition, this episode has one! This week it includes a side project that burned five billion tokens, why there is no correct way to pronounce anything in English, why "don't reinvent the wheel" is some of the dumbest advice our industry repeats, the pushback Mitchell Hashimoto gets, the New York subway fare as a case study in being furious about something you don't understand, and why Kris thinks a decade should be the longest sentence anybody should serve. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/floML9DtF2c. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Show Notes: Kirsten Lowe - Literacy Crisis 101 Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Feelings About AI, and the 35 Percent Blog Post (00:01:55)Chapter 2: AI Tells and the Reader Revolt (00:10:18)Chapter 3: Writing Was Never Valued, and Words Are Expensive (00:14:13)Chapter 5: The Literacy Crisis: Reading Without Comprehending (00:18:59)Chapter 7: No Compiler for Your Writing, and Writing Is Thinking (00:25:56)Chapter 10: Taught to Read Wrong, Taught...

A Record of One's Own

49 min

Matthew hosts this week, joined by Kris and by Bailey Townsend, an AT Protocol community ambassador who builds tools for the atmosphere. AT Proto is the protocol underneath Bluesky, and this is a conversation about what it actually is beyond a social network. Matthew moved his own account onto a personal data server he runs himself, which is how Bailey first turned up in his replies asking whether he meant to delete his rotation keys. From there the pair expand on what a PDS is: your data, your identity, and your own way of doing authentication. Along the way there is Tangled, Leaflet, Hubble quietly mirroring 24 million repositories, and the reality that it's just a giant, web scale database. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a report from AT Protocol Community Day at the Recurse Center, the difference between a Bluesky feed and a list, Matthew confessing he has never liked a single post, SDKs and notorious OAuth, and why warranty history should be on an open protocol. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GelJdfqWrtU. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: How Matthew Ended Up Running His Own Server (00:02:19)Chapter 2: What AT Proto Is, and What Bailey Builds On It (00:04:37)Chapter 3: Owning Your Data, and Taking It With You (00:08:17)Chapter 4: Beyond Bluesky: Tangled, Leaflet, and Owning Your Posts (00:11:30)Chapter 5: One Identity, Every App (00:15:09)Chapter 6: Auth for Free, and the Login That Was Never Bluesky (00:18:32)Chapter 7: One Database Everybody Shares (00:22:48)Chapter 8: Apps Come and Go, the Data Stays...

Be Kind, Rewind

57 min

Matthew takes the host chair this week with Kris as an unusually quiet producer. They're joined by Ron Efroni and James Bayer from Flox for a long conversation about Nix. Ron co-founded Flox and is also the president of the NixOS Foundation. James gives a live demo, going from flox search to flox activate with no commit SHA anywhere in sight, and Matthew finally gets an answer to a flake.lock code review problem: what exactly am I approving when the diff is one hash for another? Ron makes the cancel worthy claim that Nix is not hard, it just lacks opinionation by design, which turns out to be the entire reason Flox exists. Then the conversation turns to agents, why skills are software, and the company that uses Flox to turn back time on a model and replay the exact environment a bad answer came out of. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Kelsey Hightower's hand in the containerize project, Ron on where the open source ends and the invoice begins, the customer who compared Flox to really good Wi-Fi, what actually keeps Ron up at night, Kris talking about the truly absurd amount of hardware humming away in his apartment, and a closing detour through AOL discs, Blockbuster late fees, and dedicated tape rewinders. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eWjJVaDKRWU No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Chapter 1: Matthew Takes the Host Chair (00:00:58)Chapter 2: What Is Flox, and Who Is Actually Using It (00:02:34)Chapter 3: Do You Still Need Nix? Escape Hatches and SHA Pinning (00:09:43)Chapter 4: Live Demo: The Flox CLI and the Catalog (00:12:00)Chapter 5: What Goes In Your Repo, and the Nix Store (00:19:52)Chapter 6: Why Not Just Use Nix? Scale, Enterprise, Multiplayer (00:23:02)Chapter 7: Nix Is Not Hard, It Just Has No Opinio...

A Modest Proposal Proposal

1 hr 58 min

The proposal proposal gets the full Fallthrough treatment. Kris, Matthew, and Jamie dig into Austin's plan for taming the Go project's ever-growing proposal backlog. What starts as a recap becomes a referendum on how Go is governed, who gets heard, and what an open source community owes its members. Jamie brings a maintainer's reality check from Renovate's 1,700-item triage queue, Matthew wants to close the whole backlog and let people prove they care, and Kris argues the real product of a proposal system is discourse, not decisions. Along the way: whether Go is a democracy or a Google project, the joy economy that open source actually runs on, where "yes is forever" went when the UUID package shipped without consensus, and the gloves finally coming off over performative civility in Go's discussion spaces. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Steve getting ratioed by Gen X on TikTok, T9 texting supremacy, why Go should never become a nation state, the IETF as proof that communities of joy do ship, and the biggest lie in open source. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CJkw4dqY38k No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Ratioed on TikTok: Gen X vs the Millennials [Extended] (00:06:29)Chapter 2: The Proposal Proposal: Recap and First Reactions (00:06:32)Chapter 3: Nobody Wants to Run the Process (00:16:38)Chapter 4: Is Go Even a Democracy? (00:22:01)Chapter 5: Just Close the Backlog (00:28:18)Chapter 6: Let People Talk: Discourse Is the Product (00:38:20)Chapter 7: Discussion vs Commitment (00:47:53)Chapter 8: Missing Lexicogra...

Backlog to the Future

1 hr 4 min

Kris is back from GopherCon, Matt is back from the lawn, and Fallthrough is back with news: a brand new website and a whole new show, Continue: Go Proposals Edition, a weekly look at Go proposals. The topic for this week's Fallthrough? It's a listener-requested deep dive into what the two of them have actually been building with AI agents. In the regular edition, Kris runs a frontier-model pricing bake-off and comes away fascinated by how dirt cheap Luna is, Matt hands eight well-scoped Linear issues to overnight orbs and wakes up to three merged PRs, and the two land on a shared principle: even when the inference happens in a data center, the harness should run on hardware you own. It all wraps with Matt prototyping an integration by voice on a walk in the park. Expanded edition? We've got one of those! This week it includes Matt's deep dive on AMP betting everything on orbs, a breakdown of the proposal to change Go's proposal process, the one line that gives the whole document away, Kris's redesign built on gates, shepherds, and commitments, a hard conversation about civility and power in Go discourse, and the case for a decentralized Go. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/U4ztdSztCy0 No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: New Website, New Show: Continue (00:02:28)Chapter 2: What Kris Built: PHP, Rhetoric Analysis, and Dirt Cheap Luna (00:12:55)Chapter 3: Matt's Agent Assembly Line: Linear Issues to Merged PRs (00:24:20)Chapter 4: Harness Hopping: Codex, Claude Code, and Agent Teams (00:33:35)Chapter 6: The Economics Flipped: Intelligence Too Cheap...

Vibe and Prejudice

1 hr 9 min

We've got the classic trio of Kris, Matt, and Steve back to discuss Steve's impending cancellation for putting himself in the middle of some drama! Steve gives us a recount of the current saga between Zig, Rust, Bun, Fil-C, and his own programming language, Rue. The group discuss the problems with the drama, especially since it overshadows an amazing technical feat: a million lines of code ported to a new language in a week, then shipped to real customers, with a product that pulls in billions of dollars. Steve also made the mistake of complimenting Zig, which caused a 163 comment dog pile onto him. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes what it costs a community when the BDFL of a language says your code sucks, why the fear that LLMs can appear to think says more about us than about them, Steve on why you cannot ban a bunch of floats in a text file, Fil-C's promise of memory safe C and the trade-offs its author will not name, the pull request titled make Zig actually memory safe (unlike Rust), Odin not being notable enough, and Steve drops some exclusive new thoughts: agentic development is actually RTS macro versus micro. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xjDWZPBfvVI No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Bun Leaves Zig for Rust, in Public, by Accident (00:02:47)Chapter 2: Memory Problems, the Unsafe Burndown, and Andrew's Post (00:10:22)Chapter 4: A Million Lines in a Week (00:14:17)Chapter 8: Rue: The Compiler Steve Did Not Write (00:17:35)Chapter 9: 163 Replies for Complimenting Zig on Hacker News (00:22:50)Chapter 11:...

Token Maxx: Fury Road

1 hr 27 min

On this week, we've got Kris, Matt, and Dylan! Yes, Dylan is back to talk about GopherCon and his experience as a self declared late adopter of agentic coding. Dylan chairs GopherCon, speaks at it next week, and describes his own AI hockey stick as happening in about two months. Dylan walks through what is on the GopherCon program, then explains his coding agent tipping point: a dependency injection refactor he had written off that Claude finished in an afternoon. But he's not all in yet: he still won't let one robot review and approve another robot's code. From there the conversation turns to the machine underneath: the model as a CPU and the harness as an operating system. The trio then arrives at money and the uncomfortable reality of how expensive tokens are, and whether that matters at all. They also answer an important question: should enterprises be subsidizing the cheap subscription plans individuals enjoy? We've got an Expanded edition for this episode which means we've got extra content! That includes what really happens to your conference proposal when 200 submissions compete for 25 slots, the mystery process that had Kris's Mac humming, the 200 gigabytes of Go module cache hiding on Dylan's drive, agents that shell out to Ruby and Perl when you asked for neither, caveman prompting, and the math on what a $250,000 engineer actually costs per month. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: GopherCon Next Week: Community Day, Filippo, and slog (00:03:25)Chapter 3: Foot Dragger: The Refactor Claude Finished in an Afternoon (00...

I, Builder

52 min

Kris and Matt have a pretty big question they're trying to answer this week: in the age of AI, what does it actually mean to build something? We start (for real this time!) with the "SDKs are dead" discourse, and whether you still need one when you can just wrap the HTTP calls yourself. Kris then jumps the conversation to Beej's article on what it means to "make" or "build" a thing, he argues that we already lived through this during the analog-to-digital shift in music, photography, and video. Matt adds his own perspective from when he remodeled his kitchen. The duo doesn't stop with just that. In this week's Expanded edition they discuss the "well, actually" brigade and when technical precision helps versus hurts, the "I versus we" of blame, the identities we get sold and comfort chambers we live in, how character limits and engagement incentives turned social media into rage bait, and Matt's take on why "a persistent machine I can run agents on" is just a computer. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LhtXfZHRyO0. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Notes: On MakingTable of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: SDKs in the Age of AI, Do We Still Need Them? (00:01:43)Chapter 3: What Does It Mean to Build Something? (00:22:12)Chapter 4: From Analog to Digital, AI as Just Another Tool (00:28:37)Chapter 5: Who Actually Built It? Ownership and Attribution (00:36:06)Epilogue (00:51:14) Hosts Matthew Sanabria - Host Kris Brandow - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagramTikTokChangelog ZulipGophers Slack (00:00) - Prologue (01:43) - Chapter 1: SDKs in the Age of AI, Do We Still...

Everything Agentic All at Once

1 hr 11 min

Another week, another deep episode! Kris and Matthew are back and this one goes right off the rails in the best way. What was supposed to be a rundown of the new model landscape turns into a wide-ranging conversation about what AI coding agents actually mean for the people who write software. Matt brings a real dilemma: he had an LLM generate a working program and could not decide whether he still needed to read the code. That kicks off Kris's case for separating validation (did you build the right thing?) from verification (did you build the thing right?), an assertion that we already trust our compilers without reading the machine code, and why prototyping something and throwing it away can be a feature rather than a failure. Matt eventually closes the loop with a story about rewriting an LLM's code from scratch, converging on the exact same design, and finally understanding it. This conversation just kept going and going, and you can listen to the whole thing in the Expanded edition! This week that includes why the US dollar is already a digital currency, a frank conversation about America at its best and worst, why every confident prediction about the future turns out wrong, the mental health toll of clicking approve at two in the morning, and the software identity crisis quietly plaguing many of us. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Catching Up and the AI News Cycle (00:01:57)Chapter 2: Do I Need to Read the Code? (00:08:00)Chapter 3: Trusting the Compiler and the Illusion of Reading Every Line (00:16:05)Chapter 4: Buildin...

Landlord of the Rings

59 min

Kris and Matthew are back for a duo episode, and Kris has a hot take: ownership is terrible. What starts as a conversation about AI subscriptions versus API pricing turns into a wide-ranging discussion about what we actually gain by owning things, from Photoshop to your own compute to your house. Along the way, Kris and Matthew dig into why enterprises are drifting toward per-token pricing, why AMP's headless "own where it runs, rent the model" approach feels like the future, and why a number like "Meta spent 71 trillion tokens" tells you almost nothing about what got built. They also take apart the tired "now anyone can code" claim with a little help from Ratatouille, and land on a simple ask: think through your trade-offs before you repeat the take. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a breakdown of flex pricing and overnight agents, a no-mercy ranking of the Claude, Codex, and Gemini ecosystems (plus whose face is more punchable), the hundred-million-token saga of fixing Time Machine backups, Jevons paradox coming for your codebase, and a full teardown of why the IRS can't just send you a bill. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Fable's Extended Window and a $300 Opus Surprise (00:02:36)Chapter 2: Subscriptions vs API Pricing: Where the Money Is Heading (00:03:51)Chapter 4: AMP's Headless Agent: Own Where It Runs, Rent the Model (00:09:30)Chapter 6: The Hot Take: Ownership Is Bad (00:14:34)Chapter 7: IP Hoarding, Palantir, and Why Token Pricing Is Correct (00:18:38)Chapter 8: Be Honest With Yoursel...

Under Pressure

1 hr 0 min

On this week's episode, Kris and Matthew have a topic: tension. Not the bad kind you learn to avoid, but the productive kind that, like a code smell, is worth stopping to examine. They discuss the challenges of APIs and stability, whether SDKs are actually necessary, and as always a little bit of life advice for our wonderful viewers/listeners. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Kris's deep dive on why it's actually called soccer (and the perfect apple-versus-fruit comeback for every European), his love letter to Gerrit and patch-based review, Matthew on why the pull request description means jack and what Jujutsu gets right, Kris's saga of building his own podcast platform out of Supercast, Transistor, and Riverside, and the great "machines that build machines, or is that just CICD?" debate. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3y6D1Gp4TSM. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Heat, the World Cup, and America Through European Eyes (00:00:52)Chapter 3: Fable Returns and the One Person Agent Operation System (00:05:35)Chapter 4: Issue Trackers Aren't Dead: Linear, plan.md, and Keeping Context (00:10:47)Chapter 7: Solutions Versus Tools and the Meta Repo Problem (00:14:40)Chapter 9: Bending to the Tool: Forks, Filesystems, and the git flow Confession (00:18:34)Chapter 10: Code Smells and the Oxide API Versioning Tension (00:31:11)Chapter 11: Stopping the World: Backward Compatibility and the Summer of Hell (00:38:08)Chapter 12: Do We Still Need SDKs? (00:48:44)Epilogue (00:57:36)Hosts Matthew Sanabria - Host Kris Brandow...

The Spy Who Banned Me

27 min

It's Fallthrough time! In this episode, Kris, Matthew, and Steve get into the time Steve pointed Anthropic's Fable at a side project he hadn't touched since January and watched it shepherd 95 pull requests in three days, the US government export banning Fable and its sibling Mythos, the insanity of Mythos popping a national security agency's boxes in a matter of hours, and why a software engineer that runs 24/7 for anyone with an account is exactly the kind of thing governments get nervous about. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes whether your AI agents should file their bugs in your repo or on a private board where they can make as big a mess as they want, the model that forged itself a cookie to get around a testing problem and what it means for an AI to actually understand being a software developer, Steve's deliberately-out-of-context claim that millennials are the only people who know how computers work, Trump signing a quantum cryptography order while openly asking what the whole thing even is, Kris's year-long sales tax rabbit hole where nobody can agree where a person physically is, and the Diet Coke can math that says one exploding rocket is about one percent of an hour of making aluminum. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/h6Ve7WKIQVc. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Burning the Whole Allotment, 95 PRs in Three Days (00:01:56)Chapter 2: Beads vs Linear, Where Agents Keep Their Bugs [Extended] (00:07:24)Chapter 3: Is Fable Coming Back? Export Controls and the NSA Hack (00:07:24)Chapter 5: A Software Engine...

Of Fables and Mythos

1 hr 7 min

Another week, another Fallthrough! In this episode, Kris and Matthew get into the US government slapping export controls on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models, the marketing machine that made them sound world-ending, and how much of the AI hype actually holds up. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes whether your phone is already an extension of your mind and the "Clean Talk" cleaning influencers who will happily tell you to mix two chemicals that quietly kill you, the Egyptologist on a date who proves a person is smart but people are dumb, why we throw you in jail for robbing a bank but only fine you for wrecking the economy, a no-holds-barred roast of Claude Code and the flickering bug that still will not die, and why AI in the creative fields is really just Photoshop with no shortcut to doing good work. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zzMFABZ0Rjs. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Mythos and Fable, the Export Control, and Anthropic's Marketing Machine (00:02:18)Chapter 2: Freedom of Thought, Safety Gating, and Books in the Library (00:06:40)Chapter 6: Why You Can't Believe the AI Labs: Dogfooding, Lines of Code, and No Profit (00:11:11)Chapter 7: Nobody Knows Where the Ceiling Is, and the Coming Commodity Market (00:20:22)Chapter 8: Local Models, the Chocolate Shop AI Node, and Harness Over Model (00:22:27)Chapter 9: So Why Is Fable Actually Banned? Brain Drain, DOGE, and Jailbreaks (00:29:46)Chapter 10: It's Still All Hype, and the Government Did Anthropic's Marketing (00:37:37)Chapter 12: The Sentiment Shift: F...

Shall We Play A Game?

48 min

Matt and Kris welcome Fernando Duran, the creator of SAD Servers, the site that drops you onto a broken Linux box over SSH with a timer running and dares you to fix it. They go through what SAD Servers is, the spite-fueled interview story that started it all, how companies use it to hire, and the surprisingly lean infrastructure (plus the tiny Go "checker") that makes the whole thing work. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes why technical interviews are broken and the spite that turned one into a business, taking the number two spot on Hacker News without toppling over and the layers that keep the bad actors out, why three availability zones might just be expensive cargo-culting, the metrics that quietly lie to you (from Google-style error budgets to mean time to recovery versus mean time between failures), and the company that accidentally spent half a billion dollars on tokens. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: What SAD Servers Is, Click a Button, Get a Broken Server (00:01:57)Chapter 2: Why He Built It, Troubleshooting, Learning, and Bad Interviews (00:03:33)Chapter 3: From Idea to AMI, How Scenarios Get Built (00:08:53)Chapter 4: Why Tech Interviews Are Broken [Extended] (00:13:58)Chapter 5: How Companies Use SAD Servers to Hire (00:23:27)Chapter 6: Kubernetes Playgrounds, SAD Pager, and Scenario Design (00:26:37)Chapter 7: The Architecture, Django, Ephemeral VMs, and the Consul Proxy (00:33:52)Chapter 8: Running Lean, Spot Instances, SQLite, and Surviving in Ohio (00:43:06)Chapter 9: Keeping the...

Pull the (AI) Lever, Kronk!

1 hr 28 min

Matt and Kris welcome back Bill Kennedy who's been working on Kronk, AI tooling in Go. They go through what Kronk (and it's dependent library Yzma) is, the power of running models locally, and how they see coding agents and LLMs shaping the future of the industry. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes the message-caching trick that turns seconds into thirty milliseconds, why hybrid models quietly wreck the KV cache, Bill's "thirty billion knobs" explainer for dense versus mixture-of-experts models, why demo day is destroying engineering teams, and the stealth-startup math nobody says out loud. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Why Go for AI, and the Origin of Kronk (00:02:14)Chapter 2: What Kronk Is, an SDK to Kill the Model Server (00:08:56)Chapter 3: Running It Yourself: Hugging Face, GGUF, and Hardware (00:14:58)Chapter 8: Context, Attention, and the Honesty of Claude 4.8 (00:22:28)Chapter 9: A Coding Agent Is a Skill, Not a Magic Wand (00:27:22)Chapter 10: Semantics vs Mechanics (00:44:18)Chapter 11: Rebuilding From Scratch: Specs and the Machine That Builds the Machine (00:47:29)Chapter 14: Why AMP Wins: Pedigree and Economics (01:00:20)Chapter 15: How to Actually Drive a Model: Plinko, Rocky Balboa, and Attention (01:14:59)Epilogue (01:25:08) Hosts Matthew Sanabria - Host Kris Brandow - Host Bill Kennedy - Guest Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagramTikTokChangelog ZulipGophers Slack (00:00) - Prologue (02:14) - Chapter 1: Why Go for AI, and the Origin of Kronk (08:56) - Chap...

Dependencies All The Way Down

1 hr 1 min

Another week, another Fallthrough! In this episode, Kris and Matthew discuss a personal realization about what AI actually unlocks, their workflow philosophies, local models, a recent hot take from Mitchell Hashimoto, and a thought experiment that would break the NPM ecosystem overnight. Like the previous episode (a pseudo part 1), this episode returns to one question: are you moving in a direction, or just moving fast? Kris argues AI has lifted his coding domain ceiling entirely, while Matthew brings some nuance to the "just submit to the LLM, you're an architect now" take. The duo then turns outward: frontier lab CEOs claiming all white-collar work is automated while posting 300 open roles, the strong case for running local models (free, fast, and available right now), and a GitHub supply chain wake-up call triggered by a malicious VSCode plugin installed by an employee. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Matthew's Shopify in-store pickup problem and whether building your own cash register on Stripe is actually feasible, Kris going deep on typography after Claude critiqued its own publication designs as screaming AI, the pre-fill versus decode speed gap and what it means for how you write prompts, how the US federal budget actually works day to day and why simple answers are the wrong frame, and Stripe's two-business-day payout model versus merchant of record, plus Rhode Island's ongoing war against Matthew's chocolate shop. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: AI as a Capability Unlock (00:02:21)Cha...

Terminal Velocity

32 min

Has AI eaten all of tech? Is 600 billion tokens too many use in a single month? On this week's episode Matt joins Kris to talk about some of the current news in the tech industry. From OpenClaw's maintainer burning through $1.3 million worth of tokens to why we need more epistemic markers, to the rather absurd $725 billion that big tech plans to spend on AI CapEx this year. And of course, there are layoffs coming as well. Support content? We've got a whole bunch of that! This week that includes a ZFS war story where a thousand-fold write amplification bug stalls every file write, the case for why LLMs hand you mediocre output by default, today's OAuth and GitHub security incidents traced back to a standards fight twenty years ago, a spicy take on who actually holds power inside big tech, and Matthew hand-writing an HTTP server in Rust just to fight off skill atrophy. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: AI Has Eaten All of Tech (00:01:11)Chapter 2: Building the Machine That Builds Your Machine (00:06:30)Chapter 3: You Still Have to Understand the Layer Below [Extended] (00:14:56)Chapter 4: Say the Quiet Part: Put a Number on Your Predictions (00:15:07)Chapter 5: LLMs Give You Mediocre by Default [Extended] (00:17:53)Chapter 6: Speed Is Not Velocity (00:18:21)Chapter 7: OAuth, GitHub, and the Bill for Skipped Homework [Extended] (00:25:40)Chapter 9: $725 Billion in CapEx and a Wave of Layoffs (00:26:26)Chapter 10: Who Actually Has the Power [Extended] (00:30:40)Epilogue (00:31:45)Hosts Matthew Sanabria - Host Kris Brandow - Host...

He Who Controls the Source

1 hr 25 min

This week we've got Kris and Jamie! They open with the Shai-Hulud worm chewing through the npm supply chain and close on the messy economics of who actually pays for open source labor. And there's plenty of great stuff in between: GitHub's everything-platform creep, the case for LLMs as a way out of dependency hell, and the forge alternatives finally maturing into real options. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes an expansion on Kris's "pull requests as original sin" theory, the everything-platform rant that compares GitHub to Meta Business Suite, a monologue on money, knowledge gaps, and LLMs as a way out of open source debt. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 2: The Shai-Hulud Worm and the GitHub Actions Attack Surface (00:00:59)Chapter 3: Pull Requests as Original Sin [Extended] (00:19:41)Chapter 4: GitHub Enterprise Cloud and the Forge Alternatives (00:19:59)Chapter 5: The Everything Platform Problem [Extended] (00:28:17)Chapter 6: GitLab Counterpoint, Kubernetes, Feature Flags, and Friction (00:37:58)Chapter 7: Walled Gardens and the Business Model of Open Source [Extended] (00:43:06)Chapter 8: AI Safety, Napalm Grandmas, and Agentic PRs (00:43:24)Chapter 9: Kris's Theory: Money, Knowledge Gaps, and LLMs as a Way Out of Open Source Debt [Extended] (00:46:37)Chapter 10: Jamie Pushes Back: Forks, Vulnerabilities, and OAPI CodeGen Stalled on OpenAPI 3.1 (00:46:58)Chapter 11: Making Open Source a Surfaceable Cost (00:54:29)Chapter 12: The Open Source Resistance (01:07:35)Chapter 13: Capital One, Directo...

Forging Ahead

1 hr 26 min

Steve is back to talk JJ (Jujutsu version control) and the related product, ChangeSet, that he works on at East River Source Control. Kris and Steve trace why the GitHub monoculture is finally cracking, what JJ does that Git can't, and Steve's hypothesis that AI agents are pushing companies toward monorepos. Then the pair discuss the Opus 4.7 regression debate, the shift from "always use the frontier model" to using LLMs as one tool among many, and a quick discussion of the Tim Cook to John Ternus handoff at Apple. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Steve's broader thesis that it's easier to scale a big tool down than scale a small one up, why GitHub's pull request model warped how people use Git, auto-rebase and conflicts as first-class citizens in JJ, AI subsidies, and a Bun being ported to Rust. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Show Notes: JJ Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Episode 70, New Branding, and Catching Up (00:01:14)Chapter 2: What is JJ (Jujutsu) and Why It Exists (00:03:43)Chapter 3: Change IDs, Tangled, and the Federated Forge Wave (00:08:59)Chapter 4: Healthy Diversity After the GitHub Monoculture (00:14:33)Chapter 5: Scaling Big Tools Down: Bazel, Buck, Kubernetes, Symfony [Extended] (00:18:03)Chapter 6: JJ Is Simpler AND More Powerful: No Index, No Stash (00:18:10)Chapter 7: The JJ Workflow: Snapshots, Watchman, and JJ Undo (00:26:06)Chapter 8: GitHub Warped Git: Why Patches and Gerrit Are Better [Extended] (00:32:14)Chapter 9: Auto-Rebase and Conflicts as First-Class Citizens [Extended] (00:32:14)Chapter 10: Getting Started with JJ: Tutorials and Workflows (00:32:29)Chapter 11: East River Source Control and ChangeSet: A Forge for Mono-Repo Scale (00:42:28)Cha...

Regression to the Mean

1 hr 11 min

Kris and Ian dig into the slow collapse of GitHub, starting with Ghostty off the platform after years of reliability problems. From there they trace Gary Bernhardt's old observation that we took a decentralized source control system and immediately put it behind a single point of failure, then widen the lens into AI as the engine of enshittification. The episode lands on a more optimistic note: maybe AI is also the tool that lets individuals rebuild the apps they used to have to buy. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes Kris's "AI was trained on the median of human code" argument, the institutional-memory thesis for why AI can't just replace people, a tour of the local-AI hardware landscape with Zig and llama.cpp, Ian's relatable "what is Cursor? what is Warp?" rant, a policy pitch on share-flipper voting rules, and a deep dive on typography as an anti-AI signal. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: GitHub Is Falling Over: Ghostty Leaves and the Merge Bug (00:01:46)Chapter 2: Centralizing the Decentralized: Git, Forges, and the Linux Kernel Workflow (00:08:04)Chapter 3: Self-Hosting vs. The Cloud Tax (00:16:23)Chapter 6: AI as the Engine of Enshittification (00:32:02)Chapter 9: Epistemic Enshittification: Hedges, Hype, and Sci-Fi Brain (00:37:10)Chapter 10: Self-Checkout, Junior Devs, and Broken Hiring (00:46:52)Chapter 12: Fallthrough Rebrand and the Claude Design Experiment (00:54:16)Chapter 13: Typography as Anti-AI Signal: Buying Real Typefaces [Extended] (01:04:33)Chapter 14: Bleeps, Shorts, and Producing W...

No Country for Old Maintainers

49 min

Jamie returns, co-hosting with Kris for quite an eventful episode. They start with the Vercel breach, the Axios attack, nvim-treesitter, and Gorilla Mux. Kris draws parallels between the current AI hype cycle to everything that came before: Photoshop was going to destroy photographers, DAWs were going to destroy musicians, and now Claude Code is going to destroy software engineers. Just like the last episode, this one is filled with supporter only content. It's actually an extra episode and a half! This includes a deep dive on OAuth scope design and why consent screens need the Let's Encrypt treatment, Anthropic locking out third-party harnesses, sandboxing LLMs with sandbox-exec and agent-safehouse, Jamie on "no is a complete sentence" and Renovate's unusually pro-maintainer code of conduct, Kris's pitch for $100M of LLM spend going to help maintainers triage backlogs instead of Mythos-style vulnerability hunting, the real complexity behind finance departments and why $250M wire transfers need entire treasury teams, the math on a $800 used 3090 running Qwen 3.5 at Sonnet-level capability, and Anthropic's pivot toward non-engineers with Claude Design and Claude Cowork. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Eventful Spring, Banter and Setup (00:01:20)Chapter 2: The Vercel Breach: Roblox to Production Via One Employee (00:04:25)Chapter 6: Deepfakes, the Axios Attack, and the $5 Wrench (00:06:49)Chapter 7: The XZ Utils Attack and nvim-treesitter Gets Archived (00:11:22)Chapter 8: GorillaMux, the Go Standard Library, and Drive-By Forkers (00:1...

Supply Chain Reaction

1 hr 9 min

After last week's "Another Spectre In The Shell" episode, we felt we needed a follow up! This week Kris is joined by returning co-host Jamie Tanna, with Ian arriving fashionably late. They pick apart the post-Mythos announcement hype cycle, cover counter-narratives from the security community, and examine why our supply chain is already so broken that more powerful LLM barely changes the threat model. The conversation builds toward Jamie's unpop: "a little copying is better than a little dependency" is wrong, we should have more dependencies and then into practical supply chain defense. The episode closes on an infinite-mindset note: supply chain security will never be done and we'll always have things to improve. Supporter content? This episode has a ton of it! If you haven't become a supporter yet, this is the episode to do it! In this week's extras we've got a critique of the "37,000 lines of code a day" claim, Kris's argument that we've squandered most productivity gains in history so why would AI be different, Claude Code fatigue and learning versus delegating, a deep yak-shave into why Kris hates Markdown and is building his publishing platform in raw HTML, a love letter to the web as the best technology we have, a merchant-of-record tangent on VAT and why Stripe isn't enough, Jamie's proposal for a Fallthrough bingo card, and a tangent on Anthropic having a therapist talk to Claude for twenty hours. If you aren't a supporter already, head over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Jamie Returns: Weather and Mythos Recap (00:01:11)Chapter 2: Post-Mythos Developments and Counter-Narratives (00:03:11)...

Another Spectre In The Shell

50 min

It's Kris, Matt, and Steve this week. It's also Matt's last episode before becoming a father. The conversation opens with Claude Mythos, Anthropic's unreleased model that found 147 zero-days in Firefox's JavaScript engine and a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. Steve, who's lived through before, puts it in context. The panel also discusses cooldown periods for package upgrades, the implications of nation-state hacking capability becoming available to anyone, and using AI for good. Supporter content? We've got it! This week it includes a dive into post-quantum security and state-sponsored social engineering attacks. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Matt's Last Episode Before Fatherhood (00:01:09)Chapter 2: The Supply Chain Crisis and Claude Mythos (00:03:18)Chapter 3: The Implications of Democratized Hacking (00:08:43)Chapter 4: The Cooldown Period Debate (00:13:00)Chapter 5: Steve's Rails Zero-Day War Story (00:18:54)Chapter 9: Using AI as a Personal Life Assistant (00:23:13)Chapter 12: Steve & East River Source Control (00:28:54)Chapter 13: Git's Design Limitations and the Stack Diffs Model (00:39:08)Epilogue (00:44:57) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Steve Klabnik - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (01:09) - Chapter 1: Matt's Last Episode Before Fatherhood (03:18) - Chapter 2: The Supply Chain Crisis and Claude Mythos (08:43) - Chapter 3: The Implications of Democratized Hacking (13:00) - Chapter 4: The Cooldown Period Debate (18:54) - Chapter 5: Steve's Rails Zero-Day W...

Snake Oil Has an Expiration Date

57 min

It's Kris and Matt this week, and the conversation goes places. It starts with Matt going all-in on Apple and a leaked Claude Code source dump, then pivots into AI companies repeating social media's diversity-of-thought mistakes and why LLMs still can't beat "better than the average human" as a goalpost. The episode closes with a surprise detour into accounting, finance, and why double-entry bookkeeping is one of the original distributed systems. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a home lab infrastructure rant about terrible BMC/IPMI systems, a nuanced deep dive into corporate DEI and code-switching, Matt's chocolate shop tax war stories, LLC vs S-Corp tradeoffs, and why engineers who dismiss finance are worse engineers. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Matthew Goes All In on Apple (00:01:10)Chapter 3: The Claude Code Source Leak (00:08:24)Chapter 4: AI Companies and the Diversity of Thought Problem (00:14:13)Chapter 6: LLMs Are Not Better Than Humans (00:17:16)Chapter 7: AI Hype, Big Data Deja Vu, and Snake Oil (00:21:17)Chapter 8: Serial Founders Are Deadbeat Fathers (00:23:33)Chapter 9: The Hidden Heroes Who Run Companies (00:33:01)Chapter 11: Engineers Need to Respect (and Learn) Finance (00:35:03)Chapter 13: Double-Entry Accounting Is an OG Distributed System (00:50:41) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (01:10) - Chapter 1: Matthew Goes All In on Apple (08:24) - Chapter 3: The Claude Code Source Leak (14:13)...

Who's Afraid of Superintelligence?

1 hr 35 min

We've got a full panel! In this episode, Kris, Matt, Steve, and Ian have a deep dive into superintelligence, AGI, and why the fear around them might say more about us than about AI. Steve draws a line from colonialism anxiety to alien invasion movies to superintelligence panic. Kris argues that a truly rational superintelligence would see that oppression consistently fails and cooperation wins. The conversation moves through whether AI is already oppressive, what it means for AI to be a subtle overlord, and why the real threats are mundane failures of leadership, not robot uprisings. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a philosophical tangent on whether referencing external knowledge counts as knowing, a heated debate about whether humans are hierarchical by nature, Matt's island thought experiment about hierarchy inevitably emerging, and Ian's argument that not everyone needs to be a builder. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Meet the Panel (00:00:54)Chapter 2: Defining AGI and Superintelligence (00:03:00)Chapter 3: The Spicy Takes: Has AGI Already Arrived? (00:11:38)Chapter 4: What Does It Mean to Know? Memory vs. Intelligence [Extended] (00:17:56)Chapter 5: A Black Perspective on Power and Intelligence (00:18:55)Chapter 6: Did They Actually Win? Dominance Hierarchies and Revolution (00:26:18)Chapter 7: AI Is Already Oppressive: Why Aren't We Worried About That? (00:33:53)Chapter 10: AI as the Subtle Overlord (00:48:55)Chapter 12: What We Should Actually Be Worried About (00:58:47)Chapter 13: Intelligence,...

The Joy of Building

1 hr 38 min

This week Kris and Matt go full homelab. The conversation starts with Kris refreshing his dev setup: migrating NeoVim to 100% Lua, switching from ZSH to NuShell, and rethinking Tmux, all with the help of an LLM. The discussion then moves into hardware: Framework Desktop vs. Mac Studio, the RAM price explosion, 10G networking, WiFi with Private Pre-Shared Keys, and GPUs without display ports. The episode closes with a teaser for a future discussion on why Kris isn't worried about superintelligence. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a mechanical keyboards deep dive, Kris's custom AI research system that runs 73 agent calls in parallel, the memory bandwidth gap between Mac Studio Ultra and datacenter GPUs, and the joy of discovering headless GPU cards. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Notes: Lazy.nvimMason.nvimTree-sitterHelix EditorGhosttyNushellZellijZMX Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Baby Prep and Desk Organization (00:00:59)Chapter 2: Upgrading NeoVim with LLM Assistance (00:04:22)Chapter 3: The Vim Journey: Why Terminal Editors Still Win (00:09:41)Chapter 4: Terminal Emulators: Ghostty, Helix, and the Quest for Speed (00:17:12)Chapter 5: LSP, TreeSitter, and the End of the M-to-N Plugin Problem (00:20:14)Chapter 6: Customizing Key Bindings and Evaluating Your Tools (00:28:44)Chapter 8: Switching to Nushell (00:37:53)Chapter 9: Tmux, Session Persistence, and When to Drop Your Multiplexer (00:51:31)Chapter 10: Claude Code's RAM Problem and Agent Permissions (01:03:04)Chapter 12: The "Nothing Matters in Six Months" Paradox (01:11:23)Chap...

The Least Contentious Proposal in the History of Go

1 hr 6 min

Dylan's back this week joining Kris and Matt to tackle Go's UUID proposal (#62026). What Dylan thinksshould have been the least contentious proposal in the history of Go. The panel digs into the proposed API's shortcomings, the flawed ecosystem survey used to justify it, and why the Go team's library design philosophy doesn't hold up. The conversation builds into a broader critique of community dynamics and code of conduct double standards. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes the psychological cost of dismissive governance and who actually gets heard, the opaque proposal review process, what the Go developer survey numbers really say about community trust, and a debate over whether GitHub is even the right platform for proposal discussions. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Notes: proposal: uuid: add API to generate and parse UUID Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Catching Up with the Panel (00:01:05)Chapter 2: The UUID Proposal (00:03:07)Chapter 3: GitHub as a Discussion Platform (00:08:33)Chapter 4: The History of UUID Versions (00:12:08)Chapter 5: The Flawed Ecosystem Survey (00:16:20)Chapter 6: The Proposed API: New, NewV4, NewV7 (00:27:56)Chapter 7: Library Design Philosophy vs. the Go Team's Approach (00:31:33)Chapter 8: The Default Debate and the RFC's Intent (00:41:51)Chapter 9: Code of Conduct Double Standards (00:50:51)Chapter 14: Cultural Communication and the Path Forward (00:59:37)Epilogue (01:04:23) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Dylan Bourque - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram...

Deprecate the Error Interface

57 min

Another week, another Kris & Matt duo episode! This week, they're picking up where Bryan Cantrill's "Complexity of Simplicity" framework left off and asking what it means for Go's future. Kris argues Go is squarely rebellious (simple and emergent) and that the community needs to stop appealing to the Go team and start owning the ecosystem. The episode builds to a (potentially unpopular) proposal: deprecate the error interface. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes Oxide's counter-cultural approach to hiring, a riff on tech industry irony and title inflation, and a deep dive into why Go couldn't ship general-purpose coroutines. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Catching Up and Guest Plans (00:00:56)Chapter 4: Go as a Rebellious Language (00:05:38)Chapter 6: Go's Unique Position: Rebellious and Revolutionary (00:09:40)Chapter 7: Modules, SemVer, and Where Go Missteps (00:12:55)Chapter 8: Stop Appealing to the Go Team (00:16:01)Chapter 9: Building a Community-Owned Ecosystem (00:24:46)Chapter 10: Recapturing Go's Excitement (00:32:09)Chapter 11: The Problem With the Error Interface (00:41:01)Chapter 12: Multiple Returns and Deprecating the Error Interface (00:48:06)Epilogue (00:56:13) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (00:56) - Chapter 1: Catching Up and Guest Plans (05:38) - Chapter 4: Go as a Rebellious Language (09:40) - Chapter 6: Go's Unique Position: Rebellious and Revolutionary (12:55) - Chapter 7: Modules, SemVer...

Package Hell

1 hr 0 min

Another week, another Kris & Matt duo episode! This week, we're digging into Go codebase structure, package design, and why the community keeps struggling with the same problems. The conversation starts with a Gopher Slack discussion about how to arrange Go code, moves through package hell and dependency cycles, and ends with a look at community health. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes Go's missing project boundary and why internal is a blunt instrument, real world package design patterns, and how modules broke the elegant simplicity of Go's database/sql driver pattern. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of Break continues the conversation. Kris and Matt dissect the magic underscore imports in database/sql, argue you should just test against a real database, and then spend the back half debating where Go lands in Bryan Cantrill's "Complexity of Simplicity" quadrant framework. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/ep/29. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Catching Up: Snow, Life, and Episode 60 (00:00:57)Chapter 2: The Go Repository Structure Problem (00:05:50)Chapter 3: Package Hell and Dependency Cycles (00:10:19)Chapter 6: The Go 1 Compatibility Promise (00:18:06)Chapter 9: The Community Must Lead (00:26:11)Chapter 10: The Dying Gopher Slack and Community Fragmentation (00:37:45)Chapter 11: "You're Holding It Wrong" (00:45:11)Chapter 12: GopherCon vs. RustConf: The Energy Gap (00:53:24)Epilogue (00:59:32) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (00:57) - Chapter 1: Catching Up: Snow, Life, and Episode 60...

Is Go Simple Anymore?

1 hr 9 min

Another week, another Kris & Matt duo episode! This week, they're talking about Go. They cover the recent generic methods proposal by Robert Griesemer, results from the 2025 Go Developer Survey, some highlights of the 1.26 release, and more! As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes the survey's tooling data, a deep dive into GOPATH nostalgia and why Go Workspaces can't save the AWS SDK's 70,000+ tags, Kris's research into the entire Go module proxy, and a structural argument for why the module system's base premises don't hold. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of Break this week. We'll have more aftershow episodes soon! In the meantime, catch up on previous episodes at https://break.show. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Go Generic Methods Proposal (00:00:46)Chapter 2: Go 1.26 Release Highlights (00:17:07)Chapter 3: Go Developer Survey: Trust & Leadership (00:25:42)Chapter 4: Survey Challenges: Idioms, Features & Error Handling (00:36:22)Epilogue (01:08:23) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (00:46) - Chapter 1: Go Generic Methods Proposal (17:07) - Chapter 2: Go 1.26 Release Highlights (25:42) - Chapter 3: Go Developer Survey: Trust & Leadership (36:22) - Chapter 4: Survey Challenges: Idioms, Features & Error Handling (01:08:23) - Epilogue

Lava Layers

56 min

This week it's Kris and Matt diving into the state of hardware, security, and what local AI actually needs to work. The conversation starts with AI agent social networks and why prompt injection is the unsolved SQL injection of our era, then shifts into why memory bandwidth is the real bottleneck for running models locally. Matt compiles Rust on a Mac Studio at the Apple Store, and the two debate whether the traditional PC build is even worth it anymore. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes the security primitives nobody uses, Kris's local AI research pipeline, the myth that you'll actually upgrade your components, Matt's DaVinci Resolve nightmare on Arch Linux, and why the Mac Pro doesn't know what it is anymore. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of Break continues the conversation. Kris and Matt dig into why the chat interface is just the piano keyboard moment for AI, the pair programming gap where agents can't notice your manual edits, and the Codex personality controversy. They close with a teaser for next week's Go generic methods discussion. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/28. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Welcome and Catching Up (00:00:45)Chapter 2: OpenClaw and AI Social Networks (00:12:18)Chapter 3: Prompt Injection Is the New SQL Injection (00:17:01)Chapter 4: Sandboxing and Defense in Depth (00:19:56)Chapter 6: Lava Layers of Abstraction (00:21:53)Chapter 8: Memory Bandwidth Is the Real Bottleneck (00:24:32)Chapter 9: Consumer Hardware is at an Inflection Point (00:27:34)Chapter 10: The RAM Shortage and Supply Chain Crisis (00:32:03)Chapter 12: Nobody Actually Upgrades (00:...

The Vibes-Based Legal System

49 min

This week Steve's back to tackle the big question: is AI-generated output copyrightable? The conversation includes discussions of the Copyright Act of 1976, the philosophy of why copyright exists at all, whether LLM training is learning, and why owning a style would destroy culture. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes the Coca-Cola DEA deal and why trade secrets beat patents, what happens when copyright expires on open source code, turning software into giant prime numbers, the JSON "for good and not evil" licensing saga, and a deep dive into why open source licensing is an honor code system that's quietly falling apart. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of Break continues the conversation. Kris, Matt, and Steve pick up the copyright thread and ask whether it even matters to working developers, draw parallels to the U.S. tax system, and debate whether the frantic pace of AI standards is chaos or just what innovation looks like. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/27. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Snow, Ice, and Frozen Pipes (00:01:26)Chapter 2: Is AI Output Copyrightable? (00:04:24)Chapter 3: Training vs Output: Two Separate Questions (00:07:28)Chapter 4: The 1976 Copyright Act and Software (00:11:12)Chapter 7: Copyleft vs Permissive in the LLM Era (00:15:59)Chapter 8: Copyright as a Weapon, Not a Shield (00:20:50)Chapter 9: LLM Training Is Just Learning (00:23:04)Chapter 10: Owning a Style Would Destroy Culture (00:26:57)Chapter 11: The Real Problem Is Bigger Than Copyright (00:32:40)Chapter 12: AI Acceptance and What Is Thinking? (00:36:41)Chapter 13: Our Definition of Thinking Is Just...

The AI Factory Floor

1 hr 2 min

This week we're talking about Gastown! Dylan and Steve join Kris to break down the viral project that spins up hundreds of Claude Code instances to build a software factory. Steve makes the case for why this is an inevitable evolution and the conversation digs into what it actually means to treat software development as a factory floor. The panel traces the cycle from mainframes to PCs to cloud to AI, debates whether data centers are really the environmental villain, and gets into the real economics of AI pricing. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes the crypto rug pull scheme targeting open source maintainers, why conEdison is actually good at their job, whether AI subscriptions are just Uber-style subsidization all over again, the gambling psychology of usage-based costs, and Steve's secret project Docket. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of Break continues the conversation. Kris and Steve dive deep into semantic versioning, the real cost of "breaking changes" in Go, and a whirlwind history of package managers from CPAN to NPM to Go modules. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/26. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Welcome Back, Dylan (00:00:46)Chapter 2: What is Gastown? (00:06:02)Chapter 3: Where Are the AI Factory Floor Managers? (00:07:53)Chapter 4: The Industry is Cyclical (00:19:43)Chapter 5: Rug Pull as a Service [Preview] (00:23:36)Chapter 7: Energy, Grids & Con Edison [Preview] (00:24:12)Chapter 9: Mainframes Are Still Holding It Together [Preview] (00:25:00)Chapter 11: API Pricing & the Race to the Bottom [Preview] (00:25:35)Chapter 12: Is AI Pricing Just Uber All Over Again? [Pre...

Systems Thinking for Humans

53 min

Annie and Michael Hedgpeth, founders of People Work, join Kris and Matt to unpack the junior hiring crisis and what's really broken about how we grow engineers. Annie's viral blog post sparked debate about whether senior engineers have abandoned their responsibility to mentor and whether our obsession with career ladders created the problem. The conversation moves from systemic dysfunction to solutions: People Work, their local-first app that helps engineers manage professional relationships with a systems thinking approach. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes Kris's unconventional career path, a rant about why we have too many engineering titles, deep dives into relational intelligence and privacy concerns around workplace surveillance, and the technical architecture behind People Work: Swift frontend, Rust backend, and a custom DSL inspired by HCL. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of Break continues the conversation. Annie and Michael stick around as the panel digs into why early career engineers rush to prove themselves, the trap of becoming "the glue person" instead of building technical depth, and why your strength as a junior is that you don't know anything yet. The panel also discusses some spicy topics like why software engineers spew logical fallacies, and the future of computing as hardware gains slow down. They round out the episode with some Unpopular Opinions. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/25. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Meet Annie & Michael Hedgpeth (00:00:49)Chapter 2: The Junior Hiring Crisis (00:01:15)Chapter 3: AI as an Amplifier (00:10:37)Chapter 4: The Broken...

When Reality Drifts

1 hr 9 min

Nick Gerace, Engineering Manager at System Initiative, joins Kris and Matt to explore what infrastructure management looks like beyond Terraform. Nick walks us through how System Initiative differs from traditional IaC, why git isn't really your source of truth, and how the company pivoted to AI-first tooling. The conversation turns to Claude Code and MCP tools before landing on a nuanced discussion about distributed systems, and how the messy, eventual consistency of real life mirrors the systems we build. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes deep dives into System Initiative's architecture evolution from Postgres to a custom graph database, Nick's passionate defense of domain-driven design in Rust monorepos ("if I see a util directory, I go a little nuts"), why AI won't replace musicians (or you), and a spicy take on AI, capitalism, and power structures. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of Break continues the conversation. Nick sticks around as the hosts compare audio engineering backgrounds, discuss the IC to manager journey, and take a hard turn into hardware—dual 3090 TIs with NVLink, the case for water cooling, Kris's absurd home lab, and everyone's temptation toward Framework Desktops and Mac Studios. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/24. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Meet Nick Gerace (00:01:21)Chapter 2: The Power of Networking (00:05:38)Chapter 3: What is System Initiative? (00:14:54)Chapter 4: Terraform vs System Initiative (00:19:58)Chapter 5: Git Isn't Your Source of Truth (00:25:47)Chapter 6: SI Architecture: From Postgres to Graph [Extended] (00:34:47)Chapter 7: Rust Mono...

New Year, New Nuance

1 hr 0 min

New Year, New Nuance! In this episode, Kris and Matt discuss what they're looking forward to in 2026—Matt shares the exciting news that he's becoming a dad, and the duo explore the value of growth, changing your opinions, and adding more nuance to how you see the world. They talk about what they're excited to build this year, from physical projects like woodworking and doors to the podcast platform they keep talking about. Kris shares how a conversation with Claude finally made electricity click, leading to a broader discussion about LLMs as "digital librarians" and what education should really be about: teaching you how to teach yourself. As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes deep dives into local AI infrastructure, home networking with 10G and WireGuard, and a spicy rant about why centralized package management is fundamentally broken. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Where the two reflect on AI doomerism's mental health toll, why things aren't worse than before, the logistics behind society's real problems, and turning waste into opportunity with BASF's Verbund principle. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/23. Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Matt's Becoming a Dad (00:03:06)Chapter 2: Growth & Changing Your Opinions (00:06:39)Chapter 3: Adding More Nuance in 2026 (00:15:44)Chapter 4: What We're Excited to Build (00:24:57)Chapter 5: Learning How Things Work: Electricity (00:30:21)Chapter 6: LLMs as Digital Librarians (00:39:05)Chapter 7: The Real Purpose of Education (00:51:44)Chapter 8: Local AI Infrastructure & Home Networking [Extended] (00:58:38)Ch...

Stack Trace 2025

1 hr 16 min

We decided to do our own wrap up for the year. We've called it Stack Trace, and we pulled a bunch of stats from the first year of Fallthrough. In this episode, Kris, Matt, and Dylan talk through these stats and how they feel about Fallthrough's first year. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/22. In this week's bonus content, we've got some extra stats! Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: A Year of Fallthrough In Stats (00:03:37)Chapter 2: Better and Smaller Platforms (00:36:28)Chapter 3: Who Had The Longest Monologues? (00:41:33)Chapter 4: It's Different In The Moment (00:49:13)Chapter 5: The Spicy Content That Wasn't (00:54:16)Chapter 6: More Stats! [Extended] (01:00:48)Chapter 7: Thinking About The Future (01:01:05)Epilogue (01:12:35) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Dylan Bourque - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (03:37) - Chapter 1: A Year of Fallthrough In Stats (36:28) - Chapter 2: Better and Smaller Platforms (41:33) - Chapter 3: Who Had The Longest Monologues? (49:13) - Chapter 4: It's Different In The Moment (54:16) - Chapter 5: The Spicy Content That Wasn't (01:00:48) - Chapter 6: More Stats! [Extended] (01:01:05) - Chapter 7: Thinking About The Future (01:12:35) - Epilogue

Worse Is Better

1 hr 2 min

There's a famous joke essay called Worse Is Better, which compares the New Jersey and the MIT ideologies. In this episode, Kris and Matt discuss these two different ideologies and how they show up in technology, from Go, to dependency management, to electric vehicles. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/21. In this week's bonus content, the duo discusses how idealistic thinking has slowed down the adoption of electric vehicles and what a better path forward might have looked like. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Show Notes: Worse Is BetterSimple Made EasyLess Is Exponentially MoreGo += Package VersioninggovulncheckThe Bizarre Logic of the F-150 Lightning Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Worse Is Better? (00:02:58)Chapter 2: Go Got Stranded In The Middle (00:10:39)Chapter 3: SemVer Is Fundamentally Broken (00:33:32)Chapter 4: We Don't Live In The Ideal World (00:47:19)Chapter 5: BEVs vs EREVs [Extended] (00:56:26)Chapter 6: Holistic vs Deep (00:56:58)Epilogue (01:01:39) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (02:58) - Chapter 1: Worse Is Better? (10:39) - Chapter 2: Go Got Stranded In The Middle (33:32) - Chapter 3: SemVer Is Fundamentally Broken (47:19) - Chapter 4: We Don't Live In The Ideal World (56:26) - Chapter 5: BEVs vs EREVs [Extended] (56:58) - Chapter 6: Holistic vs Deep (01:01:39) - Epilogue

Why Is Tech So Mid?

57 min

In the tech industry, we talk about how exceptional and innovative we are. But are we really? In this episode, Kris and Matt explore why they see the industry as pretty mid and how things should be better. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/20. In this week's bonus content, the duo discusses the problems with hype and how it's not just about the tech industry. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Why Is Tech So Mid? (00:02:27)Chapter 2: The Innovation Hype [Extended] (00:35:42)Chapter 3: Everyone Is Always Wrong (00:36:14)Epilogue (00:53:51) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (02:27) - Chapter 1: Why Is Tech So Mid? (35:42) - Chapter 2: The Innovation Hype [Extended] (36:14) - Chapter 3: Everyone Is Always Wrong (53:51) - Epilogue

Project Management 2 Shell

1 hr 7 min

Another Cloudflare outage. A CVSS 10.0 React RCE vulnerability. We've been dealing with quite a lot these last few weeks. In this week's episode, Kris and Matt discuss the outage and vulnerability and have a deeper discussion about project management and how all of these things relate to each other. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/19. We've got a new format for the bonus content snippets in this episode. This week we've got an extended discussion about how process should follow people, not the other way around. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: Outages & Vulnerabilities (00:03:42)Chapter 2: Project Management (00:22:10)Chapter 3: Waltzing With Bears (00:29:55)Chapter 4: Process & Culture (00:43:21)Chapter 5: Process Follows People [Extended] (00:52:18)Chapter 6: We Need Better Estimates  (00:52:49)Epilogue (01:04:33) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (03:42) - Chapter 1: Outages & Vulnerabilities (22:10) - Chapter 2: Project Management (29:55) - Chapter 3: Waltzing With Bears (43:21) - Chapter 4: Process & Culture (52:18) - Chapter 5: Process Follows People [Extended] (52:49) - Chapter 6: We Need Better Estimates (01:04:33) - Epilogue

Ghostting Is Better Than Shelling

1 hr 10 min

We've had Mitchell Hashimoto on a couple episodes, and each time we've discussed his vision for libghostty. In this episode, Kris and Matt talk about what the vision for libghostty actually means for the industry as a whole and the power of platforms. The duo also covers the new models that have dropped and how they see using the various models that have become available. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XbjmqlSWlKI. This week's episode of break continues the conversation, where they continue this conversation and talk about how we're all becoming writers. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/18. We've got a new format for the bonus content snippets in this episode. All of them are together in the middle of the episode, with a small intro and outro around them. In this week's bonus content the duo discusses how AI might help save Stack Overflow, how it's making us write more specifications for software, and how it might lead to a much more viable funding model for the web. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: New Models & How We Use Them (00:02:28)Chapter 2: AI Will Help StackOverflow [Extended] (00:35:27)Chapter 3: Software Engineering Is About Writing Specifications [Extended] (00:35:59)Chapter 4: A Better Funding Model For The Web [Extended] (00:36:38)Chapter 5: SSH Out, libghostty In (00:37:37)Chapter 6: New Segment Type? (01:01:04)Epilogue (01:04:56) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (02:28) - Chapter 1: New Models & How We Use Them (35:27) - Chapter 2: AI Will Help StackOverflow [Extended] (35:59) - Chapter 3: Software Enginee...

Magic Numbers Take Down The Internet

52 min

This cannot keep happening. Another day, another outage. On this week's episode Kris and Matt talk about the recent Cloudflare outage. And boy do they have thoughts, we really hope you enjoy this exchange of monologues. If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LsOgDolc9Fw This week's episode of break continues the conversation, with a few more monologues and some thinking about the state of things. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show/17. And we've got bonus content for our supporters, where you'll hear about the Cloudflare outage in a bit more depth and hear the duos take on being a generalist versus a specialist. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! Thanks for tuning in and happy listening! Table of Contents: Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: The Cloudflare Outage (00:02:17)Chapter 2: Too Much Centralization? (00:20:24)Chapter 3: Communication Matters (00:26:22)Chapter 4: Magic Numbers Take Down The Internet [Extended] (00:29:50)Chapter 5: Programming Language Hate and AI versus Tools (00:30:19)Chapter 6: The Generalist and The Specialist [Extended] (00:49:29)Epilogue (00:50:03) Hosts Kris Brandow - Host Matthew Sanabria - Host Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagram (00:00) - Prologue (02:17) - Chapter 1: The Cloudflare Outage (02:52) - Chapter 2: Too Much Centralization? (26:22) - Chapter 3: Communication Matters (26:43) - Chapter 4: Magic Numbers Take Down The Internet [Extended] (30:19) - Chapter 5: Programming Language Hate and AI versus Tools (35:05) - Chapter 6: The Generalist and The Specialist [Extended] (50:03) - Epilogue

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