Oxide and Friends

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
GhosttyDavid'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!

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 Willison
OxF s02e23 – Predictions 2022
OxF s03e20 – Predictions 2023!
OxF s04e01 – Predictions 2024!
OxF s05e01 – Predictions 2025
Predictions 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 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

Bryan1 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

Simon1 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.

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

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 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 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?
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!

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!

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!