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 ...
May 30, 2026•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 73
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 ...
May 23, 2026•33 min•Ep. 72
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" ...
May 16, 2026•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 71
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...
May 09, 2026•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 70
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 s...
May 02, 2026•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 69
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 ha...
Apr 25, 2026•49 min•Ep. 68
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...
Apr 18, 2026•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 67
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? W...
Apr 11, 2026•50 min•Ep. 66
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...
Apr 04, 2026•57 min•Ep. 65
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...
Mar 29, 2026•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 64
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...
Mar 21, 2026•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 63
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 ...
Mar 14, 2026•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 62
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 O...
Mar 07, 2026•57 min•Ep. 61
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 w...
Feb 28, 2026•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 60
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 ar...
Feb 21, 2026•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 59
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! T...
Feb 14, 2026•56 min•Ep. 58
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 nu...
Feb 07, 2026•50 min•Ep. 57
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...
Jan 31, 2026•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 56
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...
Jan 24, 2026•53 min•Ep. 55
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...
Jan 16, 2026•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 54
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...
Jan 10, 2026•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 53
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 w...
Dec 31, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 52
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...
Dec 25, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 51
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...
Dec 20, 2025•58 min•Ep. 50
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 b...
Dec 12, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 49
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 ...
Dec 05, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 48
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 podcasti...
Nov 25, 2025•53 min•Ep. 47
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/4nGG8Mv4L88 This week's episode of break continues the conversation, with a deeper discussion ar...
Nov 20, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 46
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...
Nov 12, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 45
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 c...
Nov 04, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 44
