Fallthrough

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 (00:18:54)
• Chapter 8: A Big Fan of Pairing (00:21:18)
• Chapter 9: What Do You Do With All the Junior Engineers? (00:25:06)
• Chapter 10: Should We Slow Down With LLMs? (00:28:10)
• Chapter 11: Draining in a Different Way (00:31:33)
• Chapter 12: Now Everyone Is a Product Engineer (00:34:48)
• Chapter 13: Change Itself Is Actively Bad (00:37:35)
• Chapter 14: Stability and Primitives (00:40:57)
• Chapter 15: The Ultra Software Factory (00:43:12)
• Chapter 16: Where's the Net New Software? (00:47:23)
• Chapter 17: The Types of Recruiter Emails I Get (00:51:14)
• Chapter 18: You Must Use This Many Tokens (00:53:40)
• Chapter 19: Not Necessarily For and Against (00:58:07)
• Chapter 20: The Mediocre Answer Is Never Spicy (01:02:17)
• Epilogue (01:04:54)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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: Things Without Time Attached (00:28:15)
• Chapter 11: I Did This to Get Away From You (00:33:14)
• Chapter 12: We Told the Thing to Hack and It Hacked (00:35:44)
• Chapter 13: Remove Your Tie (00:40:46)
• Chapter 14: Unaligned Humans With Powerful Tools (00:45:45)
• Chapter 15: Worried About Skynet Now Rather Than Later (00:50:32)
• Chapter 16: Intelligence Is the Collective (00:53:54)
• Chapter 19: That's a Lot of Killing You Gotta Do (00:59:40)
• Chapter 20: Why Rich People Have Personal Assistants (01:02:17)
• Chapter 21: Science Fiction 18 Months Ago (01:05:31)
• Chapter 22: Not Where It Will Wind Up (01:10:15)
• Chapter 24: These Are Just Predictions (01:12:27)
• Epilogue (01:14:07)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Intelligence (00:28:05)
• Chapter 9: It's Just Jitter (00:29:33)
• Chapter 10: Jev: Still a Large Language Model (00:32:12)
• Chapter 12: Slop and Pangram (00:36:36)
• Chapter 13: My Doomer Take: Shipping Without Looking (00:41:37)
• Chapter 14: Words on Paper (00:48:34)
• Chapter 15: Sitting in a Stew (00:52:09)
• Chapter 16: People in Fear Are Not Rational (00:54:38)
• Chapter 17: The Deep Weirdos of Tech (00:57:10)
• Chapter 24: We Don't Have an Educated Populace (00:59:40)
• Chapter 25: Perpetually Unbothered (01:04:19)
• Epilogue (01:06:36)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Journalism, and Numbers Without Reference Points (00:10:08)
• Chapter 5: Let's Walk the Path to Extinction (00:18:04)
• Chapter 6: Technology Already Ruins People's Lives (00:21:50)
• Chapter 7: AI as the Easy Boogeyman (00:23:44)
• Chapter 8: When I Hear That, I Feel Nothing (00:29:49)
• Chapter 10: Scarier Things Than AI, and the Title Readers (00:33:34)
• Chapter 12: Frontier Labs and the Pressure to Ship (00:40:06)
• Chapter 13: The Age of Mass Proxying (00:43:21)
• Chapter 14: Blame the Whole Chain, Not Just the CEO (00:46:55)
• Chapter 15: A Billionaire Does Not Have One Checking Account [Extended] (00:49:56)
• Chapter 18: Install Floors, Not Ceilings (00:51:24)
• Chapter 22: College Is Not for Jobs, and Coalition Building (00:53:51)
• Chapter 24: Not Zero, but Very Low (00:56:25)
• Epilogue (01:02:14)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 to Hate Writing (00:28:25)
• Chapter 16: Purity Tests: Wealth Taxes, DHH, and Dirty Money (00:36:10)
• Chapter 18: Coalitions Over Cancellation (00:41:38)
• Chapter 19: The Master Branch Rename, and Performative Fixes (00:45:21)
• Chapter 21: Respect for Each Other, and Making the Wealthy Wealthier (00:49:31)
• Chapter 22: Forgiveness, and Letting People Change (00:53:45)
• Chapter 24: Back to Literacy (00:57:12)
• Epilogue (00:59:43)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 (00:25:24)
• Chapter 10: Hubble, a Backup of the Whole Network (00:28:54)
• Chapter 11: The Best Parts of the Internet, and What Centralizing Cost Us (00:32:18)
• Chapter 12: Spaces: Private Data Without the Encryption (00:34:24)
• Chapter 13: How to Get Into AT Proto (00:36:56)
• Chapter 17: From Markdown Files to Records (00:38:47)
• Chapter 18: Identity Without Records: The Wedding Site Login (00:40:01)
• Chapter 19: The Best of Sign In With Facebook, Without Facebook (00:42:06)
• Chapter 21: Closing Thoughts, and Where to Find Bailey (00:45:31)
• Epilogue (00:47:46)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Opinions (00:24:59)
• Chapter 9: Packages, Environments, and Building the Artifact (00:30:59)
• Chapter 11: Does Local Dev Even Matter? (00:36:15)
• Chapter 12: Skills Are Software: Agent Stacks and Sovereign AI (00:39:03)
• Chapter 13: Turning Back Time on a Model, and the CVE Curve (00:45:45)
• Chapter 16: Don't Miss the Shot, and Why Nix Pilled (00:50:04)
• Epilogue (00:56:15)

Host: Matthew Sanabria
Co-Host: Kris Brandow
Guests: Ron Efroni and James Bayer
Producers: Matthew Sanabria and Kris Brandow
Beats: Breakmaster Cylinder

Socials:

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Lexicographers and Shepherds (00:53:26)
• Chapter 9: The Joy Economy: Who Gets to Say No? (01:00:46)
• Chapter 11: Yes Is Forever: UUID, Accountability, and 5,000 Words (01:15:29)
• Chapter 12: What Could They Actually Do? (01:25:54)
• Chapter 13: Losing Faith: Modules, Blame, and Bright Spots (01:32:07)
• Chapter 14: Performative Civility: Speak Better, Never Listen Better (01:43:53)
• Epilogue (01:54:52)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Start

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 to Meter (00:36:39)
• Chapter 7: Keeping the Harness on Your Own Hardware: A Dollar of Orbs (00:43:35)
• Chapter 8: Vibe Coding, Skill Atrophy, and Prototyping on a Walk (00:52:42)
• Chapter 9: The Proposal Proposal [Extended] (01:02:14)
• Epilogue (01:03:16)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Prologue

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: One Hundred Thousand Lines I Have Not Read (00:29:25)
• Chapter 12: Compilers Wrote More Assembly Than We Ever Did (00:33:49)
• Chapter 13: Vegan Plus Bacon, and the Cure for Binary Thinking (00:35:58)
• Chapter 14: Never Arguing About Tabs Versus Spaces Again (00:40:41)
• Chapter 15: Write the Documentation, Not the Code Review (00:44:37)
• Chapter 17: Effort Is What Makes It Not Slop (00:51:05)
• Chapter 18: Still the Chaotic Beginning (00:57:41)
• Chapter 19: Critical Thinking Is Curiosity, Not Skepticism (01:01:06)
• Epilogue (01:08:21)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Changelog Zulip
• Gophers Slack

• (00:00) - Start