CoRecursive: Coding Stories

The Hutter Prize: Compression, prediction, and the limits of intelligence

I texted Don about a side gig: €5,000 for every 1% you shave off a zip file. It's a real contest. For 20 years, Marcus Hutter has offered €500,000 to anyone who can los

The Bitter Lesson: The history of reinforcement learning

I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program built out of plain conditiona

The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It

I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for a bit. Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know it would unquestionably end

Story: The Aging Programmer

Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she's one of the most experienced

From Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us

Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-genearted cat videos hilarious. Who makes these? He kept sending them to his wife. Then he tried to stop wa

Notes: The Universal Paperclip Clicker

  Multiple VS Code windows. "Agent stopping" in a robot voice. A laptop stand on the treadmill so Claude can keep working while I run. The Big Rich sitting unread by the

Story: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords

Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he'd just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented room in Susan Wojcicki's house.

Story: The Bug He Couldn't Name - A 15-Year Fight Inside One Developer's Mind

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 w

Story: Godbolt's Rule - When Abstractions Fail

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-c

Story: Risk Rolls Downhill - The Software Bug That Sent People to Prison

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

Quick Update

A quick update from Adam about the podcast's current state, consistency challenges, and what's coming next.  Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join

Coding in the Red-Queen Era

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 matc

When AI Codes, What's Left for me?

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 esse

Story: Coding Through Chaos : Addiction, Recovery and Acceptance

What if your search for connection took you somewhere you never meant to go—almost costing you everything? John Walker grew up building computers and exploring early in

Story: The Power of Context: Reimagining Learning

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where learning felt like an uphill battle? Like no matter how hard you tried, the pieces just wouldn't fall into place?   St

Story: briffa_sep98_e.pro - The File That Sparked a Storm

  Can a single line of code change the way we see science, policy, and trust?   In this episode we explore the "Climategate" scandal that erupted from leaked emails and

Story: Hatetris - Obsession, Friendship, and World Records

What if a simple game became a gateway to computational breakthroughs? David Freiberg and Felipe set out on a journey to conquer Hatetris, a notoriously difficult JavaScr

Story: One Million Checkboxes - The Viral Game That Defied Convention

What if internet trolls could become your greatest collaborators? Nolen Royalty discovered this unexpected truth when his simple checkbox game went viral. It began with

Story: Leaving Stripe

What if leaving your dream job was the way to discover your true self?    Jon de la Motte failed his first Stripe interview, but he didn't give up. It was his dream job

Story: Inside Shopify's Layoffs

What if you had to break life-changing news to your team—could you handle the weight of their futures? Allison's journey from software engineer to compassionate leader