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? [Preview] (00:26:12)
• Chapter 13: The Gambling Psychology of API Costs [Preview] (00:26:47)
• Chapter 15: Beads & AI Dev Tools [Preview] (00:27:23)
• Chapter 16: Steve's Secret Project [Preview] (00:27:52)
• Chapter 6: Data Centers Aren't the Villain (00:28:45)
• Chapter 8: The Case for Local AI (00:35:01)
• Chapter 10: Claude Code Usage & Hitting the Limits (00:39:55)
• Chapter 14: The Upgrade Treadmill (00:47:15)
• Chapter 17: Claude Debugging War Stories (00:56:31)
• Epilogue (01:01:28)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Apprenticeship Model (00:12:05)
• Chapter 5: Scaling Yourself Through Others (00:20:00)
• Chapter 6: Kris Never Had a Mentor [Preview] (00:25:59)
• Chapter 7: Too Many Titles [Preview] (00:26:14)
• Chapter 10: Relational Intelligence [Preview] (00:26:33)
• Chapter 12: Why Engineers? [Preview] (00:27:04)
• Chapter 13: Privacy & Safe Spaces [Preview] (00:27:36)
• Chapter 14: AI Strategy & On-Device [Preview] (00:28:06)
• Chapter 15: Swift + Rust + Crux [Preview] (00:28:34)
• Chapter 8: Networking That Actually Works (00:29:17)
• Chapter 9: What is People Work? (00:33:56)
• Chapter 11: The Onboarding Use Case (00:43:18)
• Chapter 16: Data Ownership & The DSL (00:48:16)
• Epilogue (00:52:25)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Monorepos & Domain-Driven Design [Extended] (00:35:10)
• Chapter 10: AI Won't Replace Musicians (or You) [Extended] (00:35:34)
• Chapter 12: AI, Capitalism & Power Structures [Extended] (00:36:03)
• Chapter 8: The AI Pivot at System Initiative (00:37:14)
• Chapter 9: Claude Code & MCP Tools (00:47:30)
• Chapter 11: Distributed Systems Are Just Real Life (00:54:13)
• Chapter 13: Data Centers, Water & Nuance (01:00:20)
• Epilogue (01:08:11)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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)
• Chapter 9: The Centralization Problem in Package Management [Extended] (00:59:30)
• Epilogue (00:59:39)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Better
• Simple Made Easy
• Less Is Exponentially More
• Go += Package Versioning
• govulncheck
• The 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

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue

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

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (00:00) - Prologue