Adam Gordon Bell

The Bug He Couldn't Name - CoRecursive Podcast Imagine facing a problem you can’t name, something that feels bigger than any bug you’ve ever had to fix. How do you debug your own mind when you don’t even know what’s wrong?Burke Holland’s story sta...

Burke Holland works on the VS Code team and gives the kind of talks that make you think he has everything figured out.

But the hardest bug he ever had to fix wasn’t in his editor, it was in his own mind.

New CoRecursive: The Bug He Couldn’t Name
corecursive.com/anxiety-with...

Matt is great! Thanks for listening

Bringing back Matt was fun!
I didn't even get to share all his stories. He had some wild ones about HFT that I ended up cutting it.

High-frequency trading is such an interesting world. Just insane efforts to get nano seconds faster

Godbolt's Rule - CoRecursive Podcast What do you do when your code breaks and the only fix is to dig into the runtime below?Matt Godbolt lives for that. Tile-based renderers, color-coded scanlines, zero-copy NICs—each story is a clue tha...

New Podcast Episode: @matt.godbolt.org is back after 5 years!

And he's sharing stories about breaking through layers.

Sometimes your “disk write” is a network hop in a trench coat, and your “fast path” hides a page fault.

Godbolt's rule will help.

corecursive.com/godbolt-rule...

Risk Rolls Downhill - CoRecursive Podcast What if a software bug drained your savings, ruined your reputation, and nobody believed it wasn’t your fault?Scott Darlington took over a village post office, hoping to give his family a steady life....

What if buggy software could destroy your reputation, your business and even your freedom?

New podcast episode is the story of how some code ruined hundreds of lives.

corecursive.com/horizon-scan...

New Podcast episode tomorrow.

It's about using software to commit accounting fraud ... sort of.

And it has surprisingly good music in it.

briffa_sep98_e.pro - CoRecursive Podcast Can a single line of code change the way we see science, policy, and trust?In this episode we explore the

I got reminded on Mastodon that @adamgordonbell.bsky.social talked about it! I’ll have to listen it again!

YouTube video by PulumiTV 6 Tips to Slash Lead Time (DORA Metric)

PR reviews piling up or is that just me?

youtu.be/vaj5piINhxQ

YouTube video by PulumiTV Windsurf AWS Guide: From Zero to Cloud Hero with Pulumi MCP

Lets give a coding agent access to my cloud account and say "Deploy this app to AWS"

What could go wrong?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Bc...

CoRecursive - CoRecursive Podcast Welcome to CoRecursive. A Podcast where each episode someone shares the fascinating story behind a piece of software being built. Adam Gordon Bell is the host.

@adamgordonbell.bsky.social's Corecursive: Coding Stories is one of my favorite podcasts. He's a great storyteller--really amazing sometimes--and I find it delightful when the story ends up turning on detailed technical facts or practices. corecursive.com

Thanks for sharing! yeah, I might need to update some of those graphics and descriptions.

@adamgordonbell.bsky.social I just wanted to say that your podcast is really excellent, regardless of release consistency. Even when an episode description doesn’t grab me, I always listen because your episodes are so consistently interesting and engaging.

❤️

Thanks! The schedule keeps me honest but it's a challenge at time.

Thanks! I appreciate it.

yeah, the devaluating of skills is hard.

A lot of things i know becoming priced in millions of tokens per dollar.

Btu I do think certain skills are still valuable and maybe increasing in value. Especially as it seems like the curve of LLM progress is flattening.

Nice audio essay with a good perspective on how to think about software engineering in the current moment

I’m pessimistic, I don’t agree with the conclusion, as I don’t think, all things considered, we can make many choices, but I really liked this episode, as the analysis aligns with my own. I didn’t know the feature factory term, I’ve never worked at one, and yet that’s one of my biggest fears

And a whole world exists that can't live without debuggers and an alternate world that never sees the need for one.

I predict many more years of everyone talking past each other.

Thanks for listening!

Nodding my head at a quote, and then seeing its from me. 😀

Coding in the Red-Queen Era - CoRecursive Podcast What do we risk when we let AI do the heavy lifting in our coding? Are we giving up the thinking that makes us good at what we do? And as expectations keep rising to match productivy gains, is all thi...

New Podcast episode about learning, economics and brain eating in the age of coding agents.

corecursive.com/red-queen-co...

There's this magical topaz earring, and it's locked away in a museum vault to keep everyone safe from it. If you put this earring in your ear, it whispers to you, "You'd be better off taking me out." But if you ignore that advice, that's when things get interesting, because whenever you wear the earring and you have a choice to make, it whispers in your ear, telling you exactly what to do, and it's always the best decision every time. If you're stuck choosing between two jobs, the earring just tells you which one to take, and it's never wrong. Over time, people found that the earring was always right, and so it makes the wearer's life better in every possible way. And the more you wear it, the more you get used to it. And the earring doesn't just stop at big choices. It chimes in about breakfast, what to say to your friends, and how to give a speech. And even, you know, when and how to move your arm. It's always there, working to give you exactly the advice that you need. Except then, when you die after an abnormally happy and successful life, you, the earring wearer, are found to have no prefrontal cortex left. You have long since let your brain atrophy away as the earring makes every decision for you. You have long since become its puppet. You got everything you wanted, and you made the decisions that gave you the most happiness. But were you still you? That's why the earring stays locked up and out of reach to keep us all safe. Sound familiar? The earring is what life looks like if you relinquish everything to AI.

This is my biggest fear with AI.

That it's helping me so much but also it's eating my brain.

That one is lots of fun!

Good time to tell everyone about one of my favorite programming podcast epidose (and in general) from @adamgordonbell.bsky.social about LISP in space which was fascinating

Agreed, it's clearly designed to be anxiety packed. The show is usually "loud quiet loud" like a nirvana song, and that episode is "loud Loud LOOOUD"

That Christmas episode is ... Wow

When AI Codes, What’s Left for me? - CoRecursive Podcast I’ve always found meaning, and a lot of strength, in building things. Now, with AI coding agents changing the way we work, it’s easy to feel threatened, like something essential might get taken away. ...

This was a fantastic take from @adamgordonbell.bsky.social on his latest CoRecursive podcast episode! Highly recommend. corecursive.com/coding-agents

Do AI coding agents make you question your worth as a dev? Same here. A little bit.

In my new episode I unpack this:
→ Why we tie identity to code
→ How fear disguises itself as “these tools are useless”
→ Turning AI into a skill-multiplier, not a threat

Thanks! Was a bit different then usual so glad you liked it.