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Oxide Computer Company

Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/c_318925f4185aa71c4524d0d6127f31058c9e21f29f017d48a0fca6f564969cd0%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

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 engineersOxF s04e04 – HeliosOxF s05e28 – Systems Software in the LargeOxF 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 fixingiddqd: the crate Rain builtGhostty • David's bugs: 
1 • 
2 • 
3Rain's nextest bug: SIGTTOU when test spawns interactive shellOxide RFD 619: Managing types across Dropshot API versionsdrift: 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!

Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age

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

Predictions 2026!!

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 podcastOxF 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 syndicationOxF s05e29 – AI in Higher Education with Michael Littman • — October 17, 2025
OxF s05e28 – Systems Software in the LargeOxF s05e18 – AI, Materials, and Fraud with Ben ShindelOxF s04e21 – Adventures in Data Corruption"Duck season, Fire!" • MLG Airhorn aka "the jj airhorn"
OxF s05e31 – FuturelockLaura's blog post: A disappearing Service ProcessorOxF s05e34 – Death by Uptime • "Painfully concrete" - ChatGPT
OxF s05e03 – Holistic Engineering with Robert MustacchiOxF 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 HollowayOxF s05e16 – Scaling ManufacturingOxF s05e22 – Founder vs. InvestorOxF s05e27 – Character Limit • Stretch goal for 2026: finally a C&D
OxF s05e24 – Diving InBryan's blog: College Baseball, Venture Capital, and the Long MaybeOxF s03e31 – Hiring Processes with Gergely OroszOxF 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!

OxF 2025 Wrap-Up

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 MustacchiOxF s04e14 – Rebooting a datacenter: A decade laterOxF s01e26 – The Pragmatism of HubrisOxF s05e20 – Debugger-Driven Development • (omdb)
OxF s05e07 – Transparency in Hardware/Software InterfacesOxF s05e31 – FuturelockOxF 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 packetsgist — Summarizing the Hubris side of investigationsMatt'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!

Death by Uptime

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 ServiceOxF 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 corruptionRFD 177: Implementation of Data Storagethe "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!

Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug

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. InvestorTopic • [@M:SS](link into recording) 
Leventhal's Conundrum • 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!

Founder vs. Investor with Liz Zalman and Jerry Neumann

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:

OxF s05e22 - When Async Attacks!OxF s05e26 - Technological Revolutions with Jerry Neumann
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Oxide RFD 609: Futurelock • 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!

Futurelock

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:

OxF s05e06 - A Half‑Century of Silicon Valley with Randy ShoupOxF s05e26 - Technological Revolutions with Jerry NeumannOxF s04e03 - Fork in the Road for TerraformOxF s01e16 - The Books in the BoxOxF s02e18 - Books in the Box ReduxOxF s03e22 - Books in the Box IIIOxF s04e28 - Books in the Box IV
Other Notes:

Princeton Review: Happiest StudentsUMass Dining Named Best Campus Food by The Princeton ReviewCHM Oral HistoriesNight Rider (and K.I.T.T.)
From Bryan and Adam (and others)

The Mouse Driver ChroniclesFumbling the FutureSlingshotChip WarTechnological Revolutions and Financial Capital • @bcantrill (
economics book recommendation • )
Snow Crash • (
another Neal Stephenson book • )
The Big ShortReinventing The WheelEccentric Orbits • (
recommended by listener • )
Language Machines Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism • (
recommended by listener • )
Molly White's **review ** of Read Write OwnCareless PeopleNOT 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

Open CircuitsSystems PerformanceWhy We're Getting PoorerTermination Shock
From Tom Lyon

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog • See also 
Systems We Love: Life of an Airline FlightThe War of Don Emmanuel's Nether PartsThe NVIDIA Way
From Dan McDonald

Inventing the RenaissanceCharles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation
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!

Books in the Box V

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:

OxF s01e18 - Dijkstra’s TweetstormOxF s04e02 - Open Source LLMs with Simon WillisonOxF s05e18 - AI, Materials, and Fraud with Ben Shindel
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Michael's home pageLeslie KaelblingComputing Up: Rich Sutton • 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!

AI in Higher Education with Michael Littman

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:

OxF s05e21 - Rebooting a Datacenter: A Decade LaterOxF s01e09 - Agile + 20OxF s04e11 - A Baseball Startup with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel
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 BallersBryan'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
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!

Systems Software in the Large

What happens when the Oxide API is slow? A podcast episode! More specifically, one about how the team employed all manner of debugging techniques to track it down to one obscure and configurable async runtime feature! Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the team to talk about that journey and the tools we used (and made!) along the way.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, Dave Pacheco, Eliza Weisman, and Augustus Mayo.

Previous episodes mentioned:

Oxide and the Chamber of MysteriesThe Saga of SagasDTrace at 20Cultural IdiosyncrasiesMr. Nagle’s Wild RideA Debugging OdysseyRTO or GTFO
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Falling in Love with RustTokio Runtime Builder – disable_lifo_slotmagic‑trace (GitHub)Magic Trace podcast episode from Jane Streetdiesel‑dtrace (GitHub)omicron issue commentqorbstatemaptokio‑dtracetokio issue #7411Visualizing Systems with StatemapsPostgreSQL WAL INIT ZEROStatemaps: Visualizing System Behavior (YouTube)
The statemaps that we referred to:

Nexus by thread • , discussed starting at 
55:29 • . (This statemap has some states coalesced; 
the full version • is also available.)
Nexus by Tokio task, tagged by thread • , discussed starting at 
1:15:33
The D scripts that we referred to:

nexus-statemap.d • used to generate the initial statemap
nexus-profile.d • to understand what was consuming CPU
tokio-statemap-tagged.d • to generate the Tokio task statemap

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!

When Async Attacks!

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