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. Matt adds his own perspective from when he remodeled his kitchen. The duo doesn't stop with just that. In this week's Expanded edition they discuss the "well, actually" brigade and when technical precision helps versus hurts, the "I versus we" of blame, the identities we get sold and comfort chambers we live in, how character limits and engagement incentives turned social media into rage bait, and Matt's take on why "a persistent machine I can run agents on" is just a computer. 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/LhtXfZHRyO0. 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! Notes:On MakingTable of Contents:Prologue (00:00:00)Chapter 1: SDKs in the Age of AI, Do We Still Need Them? (00:01:43)Chapter 3: What Does It Mean to Build Something? (00:22:12)Chapter 4: From Analog to Digital, AI as Just Another Tool (00:28:37)Chapter 5: Who Actually Built It? Ownership and Attribution (00:36:06)Epilogue (00:51:14) Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagramTikTokChangelog ZulipGophers Slack

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 right thing?) from verification (did you build the thing right?), an assertion that we already trust our compilers without reading the machine code, and why prototyping something and throwing it away can be a feature rather than a failure. Matt eventually closes the loop with a story about rewriting an LLM's code from scratch, converging on the exact same design, and finally understanding it. This conversation just kept going and going, and you can listen to the whole thing in the Expanded edition! This week that includes why the US dollar is already a digital currency, a frank conversation about America at its best and worst, why every confident prediction about the future turns out wrong, the mental health toll of clicking approve at two in the morning, and the software identity crisis quietly plaguing many of us. 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. 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: Catching Up and the AI News Cycle (00:01:57)Chapter 2: Do I Need to Read the Code? (00:08:00)Chapter 3: Trusting the Compiler and the Illusion of Reading Every Line (00:16:05)Chapter 4: Building It Twice: Prototyping and Throwing It Out (00:26:28)Chapter 5: Linus Says AI Is Fine; Cloud Code Is Melting My Brain (00:29:20)Chapter 6: Nobody Understands Computers; Architecture Is the Real Work (00:32:09)Chapter 7: Oxide: Architecting an Ephemeral Runner Pool, and Learning by Osmosis (00:39:35)Chapter 14: Space for Everyone, Matt's V2 Rewrite, and Comfort in Discomfort (00:49:54)Chapter 15: The Volatile Era: Adoption Phases, Subscriptions, and Token Christmas (00:59:06)Epilogue (01:09:06) Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagramTikTokChangelog ZulipGophers Slack

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 like "Meta spent 71 trillion tokens" tells you almost nothing about what got built. They also take apart the tired "now anyone can code" claim with a little help from Ratatouille, and land on a simple ask: think through your trade-offs before you repeat the take. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes a breakdown of flex pricing and overnight agents, a no-mercy ranking of the Claude, Codex, and Gemini ecosystems (plus whose face is more punchable), the hundred-million-token saga of fixing Time Machine backups, Jevons paradox coming for your codebase, and a full teardown of why the IRS can't just send you a bill. 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. 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: Fable's Extended Window and a $300 Opus Surprise (00:02:36)Chapter 2: Subscriptions vs API Pricing: Where the Money Is Heading (00:03:51)Chapter 4: AMP's Headless Agent: Own Where It Runs, Rent the Model (00:09:30)Chapter 6: The Hot Take: Ownership Is Bad (00:14:34)Chapter 7: IP Hoarding, Palantir, and Why Token Pricing Is Correct (00:18:38)Chapter 8: Be Honest With Yourself: Own vs Rent Math (00:24:07)Chapter 9: Token Counts Aren't Output: The Meta 71 Trillion Myth (00:29:44)Chapter 11: Local Hardware Trade-offs: Speed, Availability, Budget (00:40:06)Chapter 13: Anyone Can Cook, But Not Everyone Can (00:43:52)Chapter 14: Why the IRS Can't Just Send You a Bill [Extended] (00:50:25)Chapter 15: Check Your Gut: Chat Search and Apple Intelligence (00:50:25)Chapter 16: Home Ownership, Raises, and the Chip Shortage (00:53:27)Epilogue (00:57:25) Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagramTikTokChangelog ZulipGophers Slack

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 comeback for every European), his love letter to Gerrit and patch-based review, Matthew on why the pull request description means jack and what Jujutsu gets right, Kris's saga of building his own podcast platform out of Supercast, Transistor, and Riverside, and the great "machines that build machines, or is that just CICD?" debate. 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/3y6D1Gp4TSM. 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: Heat, the World Cup, and America Through European Eyes (00:00:52)Chapter 3: Fable Returns and the One Person Agent Operation System (00:05:35)Chapter 4: Issue Trackers Aren't Dead: Linear, plan.md, and Keeping Context (00:10:47)Chapter 7: Solutions Versus Tools and the Meta Repo Problem (00:14:40)Chapter 9: Bending to the Tool: Forks, Filesystems, and the git flow Confession (00:18:34)Chapter 10: Code Smells and the Oxide API Versioning Tension (00:31:11)Chapter 11: Stopping the World: Backward Compatibility and the Summer of Hell (00:38:08)Chapter 12: Do We Still Need SDKs? (00:48:44)Epilogue (00:57:36)Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagramTikTokChangelog ZulipGophers Slack

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. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes whether your AI agents should file their bugs in your repo or on a private board where they can make as big a mess as they want, the model that forged itself a cookie to get around a testing problem and what it means for an AI to actually understand being a software developer, Steve's deliberately-out-of-context claim that millennials are the only people who know how computers work, Trump signing a quantum cryptography order while openly asking what the whole thing even is, Kris's year-long sales tax rabbit hole where nobody can agree where a person physically is, and the Diet Coke can math that says one exploding rocket is about one percent of an hour of making aluminum. 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/h6Ve7WKIQVc. 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: Burning the Whole Allotment, 95 PRs in Three Days (00:01:56)Chapter 2: Beads vs Linear, Where Agents Keep Their Bugs [Extended] (00:07:24)Chapter 3: Is Fable Coming Back? Export Controls and the NSA Hack (00:07:24)Chapter 5: A Software Engineer in Every Pocket, Running 24/7 (00:12:57)Chapter 6: Anthropic Can't Explain Itself, Dario and the Death of Media Training (00:15:20)Chapter 13: People Are People, Contradictions and Closing the Loop (00:19:16)Epilogue (00:23:33) Socials:WebsiteBlueskyThreadsX/TwitterLinkedInInstagramTikTokChangelog ZulipGophers Slack