OpenAI Eng & Dev Tools Founder: How Software Engineering Is Changing | Charlie Marsh

The Peterman Pod

Jun 22, 2026•1 hr 23 min

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Episode description

Charlie Marsh is the founder of Astral, the Python devtool startup that was acquired by OpenAI. I inteviewed him about how software engineering is changing and learnings from starting his own company as an engineer.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/

• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/Iw65FD4MGgs

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835

• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/openai-eng-and-dev-tools-founder

Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work:

• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(00:40) Origin story

(06:04) The front page of Hacker News

(14:35) Why he chose Rust

(20:10) Full codebase migration from Zig to Rust

(28:40) LLM generated code and open source

(35:34) Performance optimizations

(44:54) Optimization with AI and combating slop

(01:02:08) Learnings as an eng starting a company

(01:17:55) Top technical talk recommendation

(01:18:56) Advice for his younger self