Fallthrough

All episodes(47)

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  Backlog to the Future

  Published Aug 15, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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 is

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  Vibe and Prejudice

  Published Aug 8, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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 o

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  Token Maxx: Fury Road

  Published Aug 1, 2026

  Dylan Bourque

  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 stil

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  I, Builder

  Published Jul 25, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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. M

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  Everything Agentic All at Once

  Published Jul 18, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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 rig

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  Landlord of the Rings

  Published Jul 11, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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 lik

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  Under Pressure

  Published Jul 4, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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 co

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  The Spy Who Banned Me

  Published Jun 27, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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

  anthropic
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  Of Fables and Mythos

  Published Jun 20, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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

  anthropic
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  Shall We Play A Game?

  Published Jun 13, 2026

  Fernando Duran

  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

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  Pull the (AI) Lever, Kronk!

  Published Jun 6, 2026

  Bill Kennedy

  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 versu

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  Dependencies All The Way Down

  Published May 30, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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 b

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  Terminal Velocity

  Published May 23, 2026

  Matthew Sanabria

  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

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  He Who Controls the Source

  Published May 16, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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" t

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  Forging Ahead

  Published May 9, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 Tern

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  Regression to the Mean

  Published May 2, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 su

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  No Country for Old Maintainers

  Published Apr 25, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 hal

  anthropic
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  Supply Chain Reaction

  Published Apr 18, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 depende

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  Another Spectre In The Shell

  Published Apr 11, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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

  anthropic
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  Snake Oil Has an Expiration Date

  Published Apr 4, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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

  anthropic
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  Who's Afraid of Superintelligence?

  Published Mar 29, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 o

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  The Joy of Building

  Published Mar 21, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 superintelligenc

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  The Least Contentious Proposal in the History of Go

  Published Mar 14, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 i

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  Deprecate the Error Interface

  Published Mar 7, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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'

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  Package Hell

  Published Feb 28, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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

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  Is Go Simple Anymore?

  Published Feb 21, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 argumen

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  Lava Layers

  Published Feb 14, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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! Th

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  The Vibes-Based Legal System

  Published Feb 7, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 num

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  The AI Factory Floor

  Published Jan 31, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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 econo

  anthropic
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  Systems Thinking for Humans

  Published Jan 24, 2026

  Annie Hedgpeth

  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 wit

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  When Reality Drifts

  Published Jan 16, 2026

  Nick Gerace

  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 syste

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  New Year, New Nuance

  Published Jan 10, 2026

  Kris Brandow

  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

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  Stack Trace 2025

  Published Dec 31, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  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'

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  Worse Is Better

  Published Dec 25, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  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.I

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  Why Is Tech So Mid?

  Published Dec 20, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  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 wi

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  Project Management 2 Shell

  Published Dec 12, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  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

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  Ghostting Is Better Than Shelling

  Published Dec 5, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  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 con

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  Magic Numbers Take Down The Internet

  Published Nov 25, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  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/LsOgDolc9FwThis 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

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  The AI Marketing Problem

  Published Nov 20, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  The tech industry is terrible at marketing things. From AI to Blockchain to Git, we constantly miss the actual innovation by looking too closely at the surface level. In this episode, Kris is joined by the full panel of Ian, Matthew, and Dylan to discuss the marketing problem AI seems to have and its wider implications.If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4nGG8Mv4L88This week's episode of break continues the conversation, with a deeper discussion arou

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  Artisanal Software Engineering

  Published Nov 12, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  Software engineering has an identity problem. Some software engineers want to be craftspeople and artisans, while others want to be more like the traditional engineers, while others just want to write some code. In this episode, Kris and Matt talk about the state of software engineering today and the areas that they think could use improvement.For this week's episode of break, we're pulling one out of the archives! Sometimes we record an episode and don't ship it for quite a while, and this one

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  The Fault In Our Clouds

  Published Nov 4, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  First it was GCP in June. Then it was AWS in October. Then it was Azure a week later. It seems that our cloud providers are having outages far more often, and for far longer, than any of us would like. In this episode, Kris, Ian, and Matthew discuss the two most recent outages along with some of their thoughts on the current state of the industry and the future of software.We continue this discussion in this week's episode of Break! The panel talks about whether seeking a career with a FAANG com

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  JJ and How to Evolve an Open Source Ecosystem

  Published Oct 28, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  Jujutsu is a new version control system that's gaining in popularity. Its swappable backends allow users to continue using version control systems like Git without other users even noticing. Steve Klabnik aims to be a big part of it. Much like with Rust, he's getting involved early and making some big swings. In this episode, he joins Kris and Matt to discuss JJ and his recent announcement that he'll be joining East River Source Control to work on JJ and related projects full time.We continue th

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  DevOps: The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything

  Published Oct 20, 2025

  Cory O'Daniel

  In this episode, hosts Angelica Hill and Matthew Sanabria are joined by special guest Cory O'Daniel to dive deep into DevOps. They chat through some of the big questions shaping the industry: Is the "cloud promise" still holding up? What role does on-prem infrastructure play now? And perhaps most importantly, what does "DevOps" even mean today?We continue this discussion in this week's episode of Break! We get into some of the topics briefly mentioned during the main episode. Watch it on YouTube

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  Ghostty & The Shell

  Published Oct 13, 2025

  Mitchell Hashimoto

  Mitchell once again joins Matt and Kris to give us an update about Ghostty, a new library he's working on called libxev, and some of his thoughts around AI.We continue this discussion in this week's episode of Break! We get into some of the topics briefly mentioned during the main episode. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show.For our supporters, we have extra chapters on Mitchell's talk on open source governance and requiring

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  The Failure of Open Source Leadership

  Published Oct 7, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  Open source project leaders have faced heavy challenges over the last decade and a half. It seems every language community has had conflicts with its leadership: Python with the struggles of the Python 2 to 3 migration; Node.JS and the community's conflict with Joyent; Rust and their handling of trademarks and IP; Wordpress and their conflict with WPEngine; and of course Go and their conflict around dependency management (and error handling). Now we've added another: the recent conflict between

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  PHP Was Never Dead

  Published Sep 30, 2025

  Kris Brandow

  This week we've got a grab bag episode! Kris and Matt discuss a variety of topics, including a GopherCon debrief (featuring some RustConf comparisons!), why people can't be mad all the time, the need for better abstractions, and so much more!We continue this discussion in this week's episode of Break! We get into some of the topics briefly mentioned during the main episode. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show.For our supporte

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  Defer Life Considered Harmful

  Published Sep 23, 2025

  Ron Evans

  From AI winters to Tiny Go, Ron Evans has a long and storied career. In this episode he joins Angelica and Matt to discuss his journey, what past AI winters can tell us about our current AI moment, the importance of Tiny Go, and so much more.This week's episode has a Break aftershow! Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show.For our supporters, we've got two great chapters about epistemology and how AI affects newcomers to programm

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