Episode notes
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 programmers alive. She surveyed hundreds of software engineers about getting older. What scares you? What's changed? What have you lost? The things people feared most — memory, stamina, keeping up — weren't the real threats. The stuff that was actually breaking down was mostly fixable. A bad knee wasn't aging, it was a torn cartilage. Wrist pain disappeared when she changed how she slept. But buried in the research was…
CoRecursive: Coding Stories
by Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer · English · Tech & Science
The stories and people behind the code. Hear stories of software development from interesting people.
More from CoRecursive: Coding Stories
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E123 · 4 Aug 2026 · 53 min
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 losslessly compress a gigabyte of Wikipedia below 110 megabytes. Gzip gets you to 322. After that you're on your own. So we tried. Run-length encoding. Pointing back instead of repeating yourself. Huffman coding worked out by hand. Arithmetic coding, which spends less than one bit per character. Then Claude Shannon's 1951 guessing game, and a paper where an LLM beats every record and still wins nothing, because the model counts…
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E122 · 13 Jun 2026 · 1 hr
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 conditionals get better on its own? So late one night I sent Don a paper. Three words in the title: reward is enough. The claim is that all of intelligence, the whole thing, comes down to a system maximizing a reward. Don thought that was far too reductive. I wanted to pull it apart and see if it held up. We backed up through the history to find out how far "reward is enough" really goes: B.F. Skinner training pigeons, a backgammon…
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E121 · 9 May 2026 · 56 min
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. There's only one internet, and the data isn't growing. The frontier labs call this the pre-training wall. A leaked Google memo from 2023 argued they had no moat. R1 is on GitHub. Llama is on Hugging Face. OpenAI's secondary-market valuation has climbed past $850 billion. Don was confused. So he came over and we made an episode about it. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
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E119 · 2 Mar 2026 · 42 min
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 watching and he couldn't. So I went down the rabbit hole of how social media algorithms actually work. It starts simple. Upvote, downvote, sort by time. But by 2017 Facebook has a metric that quietly reshapes what two billion people see. Then a leaked playbook lands, and a CEO takes the stand in Los Angeles. Today is an investigation into what happens when the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. Episode Page…
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4 Feb 2026 · 11 min
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 fireplace while I check if the migration's done. Somewhere along the way, I started reorganizing my life around keeping the machine spinning. Claude Code had become my universal paperclip clicker. This is me trying to figure out the difference between real work and just feeding it tickets. This is some field notes, a shorter, rougher than a normal epsidoe. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The…
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E118 · 2 Jan 2026 · 38 min
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. He expected the search engine engineering and instead he got asked to build ad serving. In Java and with JSPs and no syntax highlighting and no delimiter balancing. Launch week was a stampede and then a window on his screen fills with declines. Numbers he can't explain. Some of them look… real. How do you even name what's happening? This episode is about creating Google AdWords. Building the machine that prints money, while…
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E117 · 2 Dec 2025 · 44 min
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 wrong? Burke Holland's story starts with a college party and a bad trip that leaves a deeper mark than he expects. Sleep gets harder. Fear creeps in. His life starts shrinking. School falls apart, friends drift away, and he ends up back at home trying to understand what's happening to him. He looks for structure in the Coast Guard. Later he discovers computers and realizes he might have found the thing he's meant to do. But…
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E116 · 4 Nov 2025 · 44 min
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-copy NICs—each story is a clue that leads past the abstraction to the real machine. He shares the rule that guides him: master your layer, learn the one below, and know the outline of the layer under that. Matt Godbolt's journey proves the real breakthroughs are hideen behind the abstrations where you are comfortable and familiar. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
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E115 · 2 Oct 2025 · 55 min
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 to give his family a steady life. But the software system kept showing cash shortfalls he couldn't explain. Each time, the Post Office told him the numbers were right and made him pay the difference out of his own pocket. Eventually it became too much and actions Scott took to protect himself lead to his arrest and public shaming. How do you build trust in systems when the people behind them refuse to admit they're broken?
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2 Sep 2025 · 9 min
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 The Newsletter
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