Fallthrough

Filtered episodes(29)

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

  agents
• StandardSummaries only
  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

  ai
• StandardSummaries only
  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
• StandardSummaries only
  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

  llmai-regulation
• StandardSummaries only
  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
• StandardSummaries only
  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
• StandardSummaries only
  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

  ai
• StandardSummaries only
  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

  llm
• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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'

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

  agentsai-regulation
• StandardSummaries only
  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

  llm
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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
• StandardSummaries only
  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

  anthropic
• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

  ai
• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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

• StandardSummaries only
  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