Fallthrough

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 2: If There's Something You Got to Tell Me (00:03:20)
• Chapter 3: Where Do You Need Me? (00:06:12)
• Chapter 4: It's Time to Move Beyond Git (00:08:58)
• Chapter 5: We Have a Big Belief in Monorepos (00:12:50)
• Chapter 6: Complaining About GitHub Since the Day I Started (00:17:13)
• Chapter 7: So Refreshing to Be Change-Based (00:21:45)
• Chapter 16: What's LLM Usage Look Like at ERSC? (00:27:16)
• Chapter 17: Where We've Been a Little More Flexible (00:29:49)
• Chapter 18: The Context Sharing Nobody Talks About (00:34:10)
• Chapter 19: I'm Not Even Fully Decided on That (00:36:42)
• Chapter 20: A Penny Off Next Quarter (00:40:31)
• Chapter 21: Software Is Getting Remarkably Worse (00:43:24)
• Chapter 22: What If Everything Was Just Actually Better? (00:45:49)
• Chapter 28: Don't Play With Our Lives (00:48:19)
• Chapter 29: Your Goal Is to Be a Dry Lifeguard (00:50:11)
• Chapter 30: We Have a Lot More Power Than We Think (00:55:45)
• Chapter 34: We Love to Promise Short-Termism (00:58:07)
• Chapter 35: We Often Place Blame on the Wrong People (01:00:48)
• Epilogue (01:05:17)

Hosts

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

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 of One (00:23:55)
• Chapter 14: You Can't Eliminate Incidents (00:27:22)
• Chapter 18: If It's Not Broke, Don't Fix It (00:28:52)
• Chapter 19: Who Do We Kill in Space to Save on Earth? (00:30:29)
• Chapter 20: Carrots and Sticks (00:35:23)
• Chapter 21: We've Been Bad at Risk Management (00:37:41)
• Chapter 22: The Problem Isn't Code Review, It's CI (00:40:46)
• Chapter 24: Get Some of the AI Budget (00:42:45)
• Chapter 25: The Garbage Cloud (00:45:59)
• Chapter 26: Put It Behind Auth [Extended] (00:48:59)
• Chapter 27: Personal Software, Organizational Software (00:51:54)
• Chapter 28: Workarounds Are a Signal (00:53:58)
• Chapter 29: Restructure the Puzzle (00:57:54)
• Chapter 30: Blowing Through the Process (00:59:30)
• Chapter 31: Learning Out Loud (01:02:49)
• Chapter 32: An Oversized Sink (01:04:04)
• Chapter 34: No Novel Problems (01:07:04)
• Chapter 35: Reading Old Books Is Good (01:08:15)
• Epilogue (01:10:12)

Hosts

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

• (00:00) - Prologue

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 Actually Like JJ More (00:12:28)
• Chapter 6: Worth Spending Tokens on Beautiful Things (00:14:32)
• Chapter 7: Git Is a Little Bit Outsider Art (00:17:11)
• Chapter 8: Eleven Stacked Diffs (00:21:28)
• Chapter 9: Force Pushes Don't Work (00:25:26)
• Chapter 10: Super Pull Requests (00:27:50)
• Chapter 11: Does No One Have Product Vision at GitHub? (00:30:04)
• Chapter 12: Meta Had Docker Before Docker (00:32:38)
• Chapter 13: Meta's Final Form (00:35:19)
• Chapter 14: Minimum Upgradable Product (00:38:26)
• Chapter 15: The Hardest Problem of My Career (00:41:26)
• Chapter 16: Consider Fewer Microservices (00:44:28)
• Chapter 17: The Hardest Version of the Hardest Problem (00:46:58)
• Chapter 18: Everything Gets Translated to API Calls (00:50:39)
• Chapter 18: Everything Gets Translated to API Calls (00:51:28)
• Chapter 19: Update the Server Before the Client (00:55:19)
• Chapter 20: The Source of Truth Is Rust (00:58:43)
• Chapter 21: Burden Proportional to the Change (01:02:34)
• Chapter 22: A Little-Known Rust Feature (01:06:29)
• Chapter 23: No Secret Sauce (01:08:55)
• Chapter 24: Testing Is Hard (01:10:28)
• Chapter 25: Property-Based Testing 101 (01:12:42)
• Chapter 26: A Simpler, Less Efficient Version (01:17:02)
• Chapter 27: Two Lenses on the Same Thing (01:18:49)
• Chapter 28: Allow Me to Provide a Stepping Stone (01:24:03)
• Chapter 29: Six Bugs, Then None (01:28:18)
• Chapter 30: A Rock-Solid Window Manager (01:32:43)
• Epilogue (01:37:01)

Hosts

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

• (00:00) - Prologue

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

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• (00:00) - Prologue