Episodios

  • Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age

    Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age
    Jan 15 2026

    What do LLMs mean for the future of software engineering? Will vibe-coded AI slop be the norm? Will software engineers simply be less in-demand? Rain and David join Bryan and Adam to discuss how rigorous use of LLMs can make for much more robust systems.

    In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Rain Paharia, and David Crespo.

    Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

    • OxF s03e08 – Does a GPT future need software engineers
    • OxF s04e04 – Helios
    • OxF s05e28 – Systems Software in the Large
    • OxF s04e20 – Pragmatic LLM Usage with Nicholas Carlini

    Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

    • The issue Bryan was fixing
    • iddqd: the crate Rain built
    • Ghostty
      • David's bugs: 1 2 3
    • Rain's nextest bug: SIGTTOU when test spawns interactive shell
    • Oxide RFD 619: Managing types across Dropshot API versions
    • drift: the crate Adam built

    If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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    1 h y 33 m
  • Predictions 2026!!

    Predictions 2026!!
    Jan 8 2026
    Time for the annual predictions episode! Bryan and Adam were joined by frequent future-ologists Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, and Ian Grunert to review past predictions and peer into the future. If any of these predictions come to fruition, it's going to be an interest 1, 3, or 6 years!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, and Ian Grunert.Previously on Oxide and Friends:OxF s04e02 – Open Source LLMs with Simon WillisonOxF s02e23 – Predictions 2022OxF s03e20 – Predictions 2023!OxF s04e01 – Predictions 2024!OxF s05e01 – Predictions 2025Predictions during the show:Adam1 year: AI companies go on an acquisition binge (especially for anything that smells like data)3 year: Crisis of AI slop open source (both projects and contributions)6 year: Jensen hands over the reins at Nvidia6 year: Tesla is out of the consumer car business6 year: With the iPhone market shrinking, Apple has several new attempts at the next potential flagship productBryan1 year: "Vibe coding" is out of the lexicon -- or used strictly pejoratively it becomes a named condition (for which Adam -- in an act of nomenclature genius rivaling The Leventhal Conundrum -- suggested "Deep Blue")1 year: A frontier model company has a prominent whitepaper making the case that AI will lead to broad-based prosperity rather than job loss1 year: Harvey.ai becomes the pets.com of the AI boom -- and a harbinger of the coming bust (which becomes known as a Correction-like euphemism)1 year: A prominent S1 has revalations of economic behavior that has an effect beyond the company's IPO3 year: Frontier models treat AGI as "already done" -- and ASI as a non-goal3 year: Custom-written software thrives in lieu of SaaS6 year: DSM adds LLMs as a substance that can induce psychosis6 year: $NVDA not beyond its November 2025 peakSimon1 year: The AI for programming holdouts are going to have a nasty shock1 year: We're going to solve sandboxing1 year: Our own challenger disaster with respect to coding agent security - see the Normalization of Deviance in AI by Johann Rehberger3 year: Something that seems impossible for a coding agent to build today - like a full working web browser - won't just be built by coding agents, it will be unsurprising3 year: We will find out if the Jevons paradox saves our careers as software engineers or not6 year: The number of people employed to type code into computers will drop to almost nothing - it will be like punch card operators. Those of us who write code today will have very different jobs that still build software and take advantage of our previous coding experience.Steve1 year: Agent Orchestration will still be a hot topic. It'll be partially, but not entirely, solved. Updated with some more rigour: We won't have a "kubernetes for agents" just yet.3 year: Using AI tools when writing software professionally will be considered something closer to using autocomplete or syntax highlighting than something controversial or exceptional.6 year: AI will not have caused the total collapse of our economic and governmental systems.If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers
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    1 h y 39 m
  • OxF 2025 Wrap-Up

    OxF 2025 Wrap-Up
    Dec 21 2025
    Bryan and Adam reflect on Oxide and Friends in 2025--favorite moments, episodes, and images. Happy new year and see you in 2026!Your hosts are Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:RFD 576: Using LLMs at Oxide (hacker news comments)OxF: Oxide and Friends 6/2/2025 -- AI Discourse with Steve Klabnik (around 1:08:00)Shell Game podcastOxF s05e12 – Hell is other networks — April 4, 2025"No Egress" was a ChatGPT joke!OxF s05e33 – A Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug — November 26, 2025Simpsons scene deleted in syndicationOxF s05e29 – AI in Higher Education with Michael Littman — October 17, 2025OxF s05e28 – Systems Software in the LargeOxF s05e18 – AI, Materials, and Fraud with Ben ShindelOxF s04e21 – Adventures in Data Corruption"Duck season, Fire!"MLG Airhorn aka "the jj airhorn"OxF s05e31 – FuturelockLaura's blog post: A disappearing Service ProcessorOxF s05e34 – Death by Uptime"Painfully concrete" - ChatGPTOxF s05e03 – Holistic Engineering with Robert MustacchiOxF s05e30 – RIP USENIX ATCTeam DTrace meets Dennis Richie, redux"Fart Boy"OxF s05e?? – Books in the Box V — The latest annual book recommendation episode.Oxide Bingo by John HollowayOxF s05e16 – Scaling ManufacturingOxF s05e22 – Founder vs. InvestorOxF s05e27 – Character LimitStretch goal for 2026: finally a C&DOxF s05e24 – Diving InBryan's blog: College Baseball, Venture Capital, and the Long MaybeOxF s03e31 – Hiring Processes with Gergely OroszOxF s04e06 – Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service"Don't worry, Alan, no one will listen" -> one of our most popular episodesOxF s04e23 – RFDs: The Backbone of OxideOffice Space: Michael Bolton as AI em-dash"This isn't nostalgia, it's epistemology" - ChatGPT"Weaponized weariness" - ChatGPT"Dry Fatalism" - ChatGPT"Cougar turned in his wings..."OxF s05e16 – Solutions Software Engineering with Matthew SanabriaAlexander Hamilton: amazing. Also the world's pre-eminent subtweeter and blogger?If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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    1 h y 28 m
  • Death by Uptime

    Death by Uptime
    Dec 8 2025

    We hit a new (and disturbing!) failure mode recently when a production rack that had been up for several months saw every (!) compute sled's service processor become simultaneously unresponsive. Bryan and Adam were joined by the members of the Oxide team who debugged the vexing issue -- and reached its surprising root cause.

    In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Cliff Biffle, Matt Keeter, and Will Chandler.

    Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

    • OxF s05e03 – Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
    • OxF s04e14 – Rebooting a datacenter: A decade later
    • OxF s01e26 – The Pragmatism of Hubris
    • OxF s05e20 – Debugger-Driven Development (omdb)
    • OxF s05e07 – Transparency in Hardware/Software Interfaces
    • OxF s05e31 – Futurelock
    • OxF s05e33 – A Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug

    Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

    • hubris #2304: STM32H7 Ethernet driver stops yielding CPU after many packets
    • gist — Summarizing the Hubris side of investigations
    • Matt's blog: Hunting a spooky ethernet driver bug

    If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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    1 h y 1 m
  • Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug

    Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug
    Nov 26 2025

    Hey hey! We recently tripped over a ZFS data corruption bug–introduced over 18 years ago! Bryan and Adam discuss with members of the Oxide team as well as Matt Ahrens, the co-inventor of ZFS.

    In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Alan Hanson, Matt Keeter, Andy Fiddaman, James MacMahon, and special guest, Matt Ahrens.

    Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

    • OxF s4e6 - Crucible: the Oxide Storage Service
    • OxF s5e28 - Systems Software in the Large

    Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

    • ZFS fsync can trigger ZIL transaction reordering and data corruption
    • RFD 177: Implementation of Data Storage
    • the "fix" that introduced data corruption
    • PRs needed!

    If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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    1 h y 21 m
  • Founder vs. Investor with Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann

    Founder vs. Investor with Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann
    Nov 22 2025

    Oxide founders, Bryan and Steve, as well as Oxide investor, Seth Winterroth, were joined by Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann, authors of the book Founder vs. Investor, discussing the collaboration and conflict in company formation. Adam was also present.

    In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our guests included Liz Zalman, Jerry Neumann, Seth Winterroth (Oxide investor), and Steve Tuck (Oxide founder / CEO).

    Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

    • Founder vs. Investor
    • Topic
    • [@M:SS](link into recording) Leventhal's Conundrum
    • PRs needed!

    If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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    1 h y 29 m
  • Futurelock

    Futurelock
    Nov 7 2025

    We're big users of async Rust at Oxide, and recently we found (another) very odd and hard to debug pathology related to async Rust that we dubbed "Futurelock". Oxide engineers who diagnosed the problem join Bryan and Adam to describe Futurelock and discuss methods to identify and avoid it.

    In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included our Oxide colleagues Dave Pacheco, John Gallagher, Rain Paharia. Sean Klein, and Eliza Weisman.

    Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

    • OxF s05e22 - When Async Attacks!
    • OxF s05e26 - Technological Revolutions with Jerry Neumann

    Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

    • Oxide RFD 609: Futurelock
    • PRs needed!

    If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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    1 h y 38 m
  • Books in the Box V

    Books in the Box V
    Oct 31 2025
    Revisiting an annual tradition--Books in the Box! Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends share book recommendations (and--sometimes--anti-recommendations). Take a listen if you're looking for your next read.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by some guests noted below:Previously, on Oxide and Friends:OxF s05e06 - A Half‑Century of Silicon Valley with Randy ShoupOxF s05e26 - Technological Revolutions with Jerry NeumannOxF s04e03 - Fork in the Road for TerraformOxF s01e16 - The Books in the BoxOxF s02e18 - Books in the Box ReduxOxF s03e22 - Books in the Box IIIOxF s04e28 - Books in the Box IVOther Notes:Princeton Review: Happiest StudentsUMass Dining Named Best Campus Food by The Princeton ReviewCHM Oral HistoriesNight Rider (and K.I.T.T.)From Bryan and Adam (and others)The Mouse Driver ChroniclesFumbling the FutureSlingshotChip WarTechnological Revolutions and Financial Capital @bcantrill (economics book recommendation)Snow Crash (another Neal Stephenson book)The Big ShortReinventing The WheelEccentric Orbits (recommended by listener)Language Machines Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (recommended by listener)Molly White's **review ** of Read Write OwnCareless PeopleNOT A RECOMMENDATION If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (If you are Molly White, please destroy this for us!)Surreal Numbers by Knuth (recommended by listeners)From Oliver HermanOpen CircuitsSystems PerformanceWhy We're Getting PoorerTermination ShockFrom Tom LyonFrom Airline Reservations to Sonic the HedgehogSee also Systems We Love: Life of an Airline FlightThe War of Don Emmanuel's Nether PartsThe NVIDIA WayFrom Dan McDonaldInventing the RenaissanceCharles Sumner: Conscience of a NationIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
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    1 h y 21 m