Keep Your Enemies Closer

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!

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!

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!

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!

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