Oxide and Friends

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Predictions 2026!! Jan 08, 2026

Show notes

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:

Predictions during the show:

Adam
- 1 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 Nvidia
- 6 year: Tesla is out of the consumer car business
- 6 year: With the iPhone market shrinking, Apple has several new attempts at the next potential flagship product
Bryan
- 1 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 loss
- 1 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 IPO
- 3 year: Frontier models treat AGI as "already done" -- and ASI as a non-goal
- 3 year: Custom-written software thrives in lieu of SaaS
- 6 year: DSM adds LLMs as a substance that can induce psychosis
- 6 year: $NVDA not beyond its November 2025 peak
Simon
- 1 year: The AI for programming holdouts are going to have a nasty shock
- 1 year: We're going to solve sandboxing
- 1 year: Our own challenger disaster with respect to coding agent security - see the Normalization of Deviance in AI by Johann Rehberger
- 3 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 unsurprising
- 3 year: We will find out if the Jevons paradox saves our careers as software engineers or not
- 6 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.
Steve
- 1 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

OxF 2025 Wrap-Up Dec 21, 2025

Show notes

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 podcast
OxF 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, 2025
Simpsons scene deleted in syndication
OxF s05e29 – AI in Higher Education with Michael Littman — October 17, 2025
OxF s05e28 – Systems Software in the Large
OxF s05e18 – AI, Materials, and Fraud with Ben Shindel
OxF s04e21 – Adventures in Data Corruption
"Duck season, Fire!"
MLG Airhorn aka "the jj airhorn"
OxF s05e31 – Futurelock
Laura's blog post: A disappearing Service Processor
OxF s05e34 – Death by Uptime
"Painfully concrete" - ChatGPT
OxF s05e03 – Holistic Engineering with Robert Mustacchi
OxF s05e30 – RIP USENIX ATC
- Team DTrace meets Dennis Richie, redux
"Fart Boy"
OxF s05e?? – Books in the Box V — The latest annual book recommendation episode.
Oxide Bingo by John Holloway
OxF s05e16 – Scaling Manufacturing
OxF s05e22 – Founder vs. Investor
OxF s05e27 – Character Limit
Stretch goal for 2026: finally a C&D
OxF s05e24 – Diving In
Bryan's blog: College Baseball, Venture Capital, and the Long Maybe
OxF s03e31 – Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz
OxF s04e06 – Crucible: The Oxide Storage Service
- "Don't worry, Alan, no one will listen" -> one of our most popular episodes
OxF s04e23 – RFDs: The Backbone of Oxide
Office 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 Sanabria
Alexander Hamilton: amazing. Also the world's pre-eminent subtweeter and blogger?

Death by Uptime Dec 08, 2025

Show notes

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:

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

Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug Nov 26, 2025

Show notes

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:

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

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

Show notes

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!

Futurelock Nov 07, 2025

Show notes

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:

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

Oxide RFD 609: Futurelock
PRs needed!

Books in the Box V Oct 31, 2025

Show notes

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:

Other Notes:

From Bryan and Adam (and others)

The Mouse Driver Chronicles
Fumbling the Future
Slingshot
Chip War
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital @bcantrill (economics book recommendation)
Snow Crash (another Neal Stephenson book)
The Big Short
Reinventing The Wheel
Eccentric Orbits (recommended by listener)
Language Machines Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (recommended by listener)
Molly White's **review ** of Read Write Own
Careless People
NOT 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 Herman

From Tom Lyon

From Dan McDonald

AI in Higher Education with Michael Littman Oct 17, 2025

Show notes

LLMs have had a dramatic impact on education. There are obvious reasons for concern, but what about the less obvious opportunities afforded by LLMs? Bryan and Adam were joined by Michael Littman, professor at Brown University and Associate Provost for AI, to talk about his role advising the university on productive, innovative, creative uses for AI in higher education.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Michael Littman.

Previous, on Oxide and Friends:

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

Systems Software in the Large Sep 25, 2025

Show notes

Dave Pacheco is leading Oxide's multi-year effort around full-system update. He recently gave a talk about his experience leading that project, the complexities of designing the system and organizing the team. Dave, Bryan, and Adam discuss the project, the many sources of leadership, and the often underestimated peril of "organizational procrastination".

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleague, Dave Pacheco.

Previously on OxF:

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

Dave's talk: Path to self-service update (slides)
Fire trucks dousing the champion Ballers
Bryan's talk: Debugging Under Fire
Roger Faulkner: "I'm not here to make it perfect; I'm here to make it better"
Mid-recording earthquake

Scaling Manufacturing Sep 19, 2025

Show notes

Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide manufacturing team to talk about all that goes into ramping up production, from people and processes to expanding the team and refining inefficiencies. It's a great problem to have!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, CJ Mendes, Kirstin Neira, Erik Anderson, Aaron Hartwig, and Doug Wibben.

Previously on Oxide and Friends...