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CoRecursive: Coding Stories

CoRecursive: Coding Stories

Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer 115 Episodes Jun 13, 2026

CoRecursive: Coding Stories is a podcast that shares the personal stories and experiences of software developers. Each episode features interviews with interesting people from the tech world, discussing their journeys, challenges, and the human side of coding. The show aims to reveal the stories behind the code and the people who write it.

Episodes

The Bitter Lesson: The history of reinforcement learning Jun 13, 2026 01:00:01 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 f
The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It May 9, 2026 56:10 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
Story: The Aging Programmer Apr 2, 2026 41:52 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
From Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us Mar 2, 2026 41:32 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
Notes: The Universal Paperclip Clicker Feb 4, 2026 11:05   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 t
Story: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords Jan 2, 2026 37:40 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
Story: The Bug He Couldn't Name - A 15-Year Fight Inside One Developer's Mind Dec 2, 2025 44:27 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
Story: Godbolt's Rule - When Abstractions Fail Nov 4, 2025 44:13 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 pro
Story: Risk Rolls Downhill - The Software Bug That Sent People to Prison Oct 2, 2025 54:58 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.  Eventual
Quick Update Sep 2, 2025 08:52 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  
Coding in the Red-Queen Era Aug 6, 2025 42:24 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 this speed really helping, or just making us busier?   Today, let's look at the tradeoffs of coding with AI and why the hardest part might be deciding what to hold onto, and what to let go. Episode Page
When AI Codes, What's Left for me? Jul 2, 2025 39:51 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. But honestly, that creative urge can't be replaced by any tool. In this episode, I talk about what it's like when your identity is tied to making things, and the tools suddenly change. Episode Page Sup

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