The Peterman Pod

Casey Muratori is a video game developer and programming creator also known for his talks about the history of software and computing. We talked about surprising parts he found while digging through computer history, where bad code comes from, and his career story.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/
• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/jHLbL1Eg4gM
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/casey-muratori-surprises-in-computer

Thank you to this episode's sponsors for supporting my work:

• Jira by Atlassian: Get more work done with your favorite agents and models all in one place, check them out at https://jira.dev/
• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro
(01:08) Digging into computer science history
(04:08) What shocked him
(16:23) Dijkstra was depressed
(26:17) The personal side of goto considered harmful
(35:09) The anatomy of a 35 year mistake
(50:12) Clean code horrible performance
(58:33) How to write high performance code
(01:01:18) Where bad code comes from
(01:06:37) Why design docs before code is a bad idea
(01:09:20) The only unbreakable law in software engineering
(01:15:57) How he got into programming
(01:21:16) Why he didnt work in big tech
(01:30:44) Should you work at a startup early on
(01:34:52) What video game engineering is like
(01:39:57) Why preventing recursion is reasonable
(01:43:24) Is vibe coding bad for the industry
(01:50:17) Technical reading recommendation
(01:54:27) Advice for his younger self
(01:56:54) Outro

Where to find Casey:

• Website: https://caseymuratori.com/
• Newsletter: https://www.computerenhance.com/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/cmuratori
• GitHub: https://github.com/cmuratori
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MollyRocket
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cmuratori.bsky.social
• Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/molly_rocket
• Handmade Network: https://handmade.network/m/cmuratori
• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Muratori

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Referenced in this episode:

• The Root of the Root of All Evil: https://computerenhance.com/theroot
• The Big OOPS: Anatomy of a 35-Year Mistake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI
• Edsger Dijkstra's "Notes on Structured Programming": https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD249/EWD249.html
• Donald Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements": https://doi.org/10.1145/356635.356640
• Edsger Dijkstra's "Go To Statement Considered Harmful": https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD215.html
• Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad thesis: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.html
• Clean Code, Horrible Performance: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-performance
• Where Does Bad Code Come From?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YpFGkG-u1w
• The Only Unbreakable Law: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY
• Dijkstra letter's reference: https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your-breath-away-5b903624ca5f#.1rdj838x6

Thariq Shihipar is an engineer on Anthropic’s Claude Code team I asked him how Anthropic makes the most out of the models for engineering and how the industry will change soon.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/
• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/2Kch3tWMnw8
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/how-anthropic-builds-and-how-engineering

Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work:

• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro
(00:29) Onboarding at Anthropic
(02:53) Internal capabilities vs external perception
(06:16) Model vs Harness
(08:55) What percent of Anthropics changes are fully autonomous
(14:51) Computer use
(17:42) How to make the most out of your compute
(20:45) Loop engineering
(22:47) Where the industry will go soon
(26:02) Which model do Anthropic engineers use
(27:38) Is learning a particular model worth it
(30:56) Prompting tips for todays models
(35:04) How to get the models to do tasteful work
(39:00) How much of writing is done by AI at Anthropic
(45:36) Code ownership and maintenance at Anthropic
(52:04) How Anthropic prevents breakages
(55:24) Visibility and sharing your work
(58:42) Luck surface area example
(01:00:57) Should people still learn to code
(01:07:42) Advice for his younger self
(01:09:58) Outro

Where to find Thariq:

• X/Twitter: https://x.com/trq212
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thariqshihipar/
• Personal Website: https://www.thariq.io/

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Referenced in this episode:

• Anthropic's post on removing 80% of Claude Code's system prompt: https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering-for-claude-5-generation-models

Martin Odersky is the creator of Scala and I interviewed him to compare different languages designs (Rust vs Zig vs Python vs Scala) and how AI will impact programming languages.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/
• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/LdN4sPWM-WY
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/creator-of-scala-comparing-languages?r=n49ky

Thank you to this episode's sponsors for supporting my work:

• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/
• Jira by Atlassian: Get more work done with your favorite agents and models all in one place, check them out at https://jira.dev/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro
(00:44) Why care about functional programming
(06:35) Why should people learn Scala
(09:26) Rust vs Scala
(12:42) Rust vs Zig
(15:45) Scala vs Python
(18:31) The programming languages that influenced him
(22:16) How running on the JVM works
(26:33) Why writing a compiler is hard
(29:19) Why Twitter adopted Scala early on
(31:00) How he believes AI will impact programming languages
(43:40) Will there be less engineers in ten years
(44:34) Top programming languages to learn to grow
(46:18) Top technical book recommendation
(46:51) Why he chose academia instead of industry
(48:28) Reflecting on Scala
(55:42) Advice for his younger self
(56:33) Outro

Where to find Martin:

• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Odersky
• Website: https://people.epfl.ch/martin.odersky
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/odersky
• GitHub: https://github.com/odersky

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Referenced in this episode:

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf
• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (book): http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html

Sergey Levine is one of the world's top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. We talked about where humanoid robotics is today, thoughts on the Chinese robotics ecosystem, and his predictions for future timelines.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/
• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/9OSbaPjv0Rc
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/sergey-levine-current-state-of-humanoid?r=n49ky

Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work:

• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro
(00:37) Where are we today
(04:20) Most surprising capabilities so far
(07:03) The most inspiring real world robotics
(08:36) If OpenAI or Anthropic got into robotics
(10:22) Chinese robotics
(13:15) Will one lab breakout from the rest
(16:59) Thoughts on a concrete roadmap
(21:03) Generalization and demonstrating it
(26:04) Types of data and which is best for robotics
(34:34) Why humanoid robotics differs from Waymo
(37:10) If humanoid robotics failed here is why
(39:55) Are there hot take modeling architectures in robotics
(42:05) Thoughts on AI safety in robotics
(46:44) Top robotics research paper recommendation
(49:35) Why is Boston Dynamics less top of mind
(53:47) Advice for his younger self
(56:42) Outro

Where to find Sergey:

• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8R35rCwAAAAJ&hl=en
• Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~svlevine/
• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Levine
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/svlevine?lang=en
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-levine-5a31a24/

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Referenced in this episode:

• Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware (ALOHA / ACT paper): https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13705
• Emergence of Human to Robot Transfer in Vision-Language-Action Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22414
• Summary of human to robot paper: https://www.pi.website/research/human_to_robot

Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of TypeScript and C#, and I asked him about how the TypeScript compiler got 10x faster through a rewrite in Go and his thoughts on how AI has impacted software engineering.

• My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/
• The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

Podcast links:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cywK3XYYJ2o
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/creator-of-typescript-10x-faster

Thank you to this episode's sponsors for supporting my work:

• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/
• Jira by Atlassian: Get more work done with your favorite agents and models all in one place, check them out at https://jira.dev/

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro
(00:48) Why write a compiler in JavaScript
(07:29) Why rewrite the compiler in Go
(14:49) LLMs for large migrations
(20:12) Why Javascript is so popular
(26:32) Why ever use Javascript on the backend
(32:59) What it takes to build a programming language
(37:06) Will there be fewer languages in 10 years
(42:57) Hands on engineering vs delegation
(49:14) Why fast tooling matters more now
(51:16) AI software engineering predictions
(58:52) The most technically challenging work
(01:02:04) Top book recommendation
(01:03:50) Advice for his younger self
(01:05:00) Outro

Where to find Anders:

• GitHub: https://github.com/ahejlsberg
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ahejlsberg
• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahejlsberg/

Where to find Ryan:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Referenced in this episode:

• Flow type checker repository: https://github.com/facebook/flow
• TypeScript compiler repository: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript
• Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (book): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures_%3D_Programs
• TypeScript native rewrite: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-7-0/