Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber.

( This is the CoRecursive / Adam Gordon Bell newsletter, and you probably signed up from the website, but then Adam stopped sending them for over a year, but now its back. )

It's July and I don't have new CoRecursive episode out this month ( details below) , but I do have a lot of things to share.

The Stack Trace Format Experiment

Over the past year, I've been playing around with the podcast format. I've had some solo essay episodes (When AI Codes, What's Left for Me?, The Universal Paperclip Clicker). I've had some traditional someone-shares-a-story episodes, including a few of my absolute favorites:

• ​Godbolt's Rule with Matt Godbolt
• ​The Bug He Couldn't Name with Burke Holland
• ​The Aging Programmer with Kate Gregory

However, the last two episodes I put out are a little bit of a new thing: trying to understand a complex topic, with Don, my former colleague and neighborhood friend.

Here's some backstory...

Years ago, I was doing training to try to figure out how to make a great podcast, through the Association of Independent Audio Producers. The class was mostly public radio people, and we had to, as our final project, make like a six-minute feature audio feature, the type you might hear on NPR or CBC Radio or something. A essay in spoken word form. And in mine, it was me talking something out with Don. And people loved it. Thought it was hilarious and informative.

So I'm trying to recapture some of that, two friends talking energy in a these new episodes. But I haven't got it to the level of polish that I would really like.

The last episode of the format, The Bitter Lesson, is about reinforcement learning and its history. If you listened to it, I apologize. Some of the editing is a bit erratic. I've been trying to build some tooling to help me edit these podcasts, and it's clearly not quite there. So I'm currently re-editing that episode to just make it smoother. But I think it's a solid topic, just with some choppy editing. But I'll have a new version of The Bitter Lesson coming out soon.

But yeah, I'm pretty excited about this Stack Trace format. Give me a little time to work out the hiccups, and I think it will be something unique and fun. Eventually, I'd love for it to be video, following the high-production-value podcast formatting that's popular right now. But I've got a little bit to do before that.

Travel and Tourism

A big challenge in 2026 is my job at Pulumi has transitioned to doing lots of speaking on the road. It's been lots of fun but it has made the podcast take a bit of a back burner.

I was in New York recently, where we taught a workshop on Pulumi, I gave a talk at Pinecone, and I was also on booth duty at an AWS event. And then I'm off again this week to go to Austin and will be a number of places around the US over the next couple months.

What I've Been Up To

If you want to see what I've been up to since I last sent out one of these, I'd certainly point you towards the Kate Gregory episode, The Aging Programmer, and the Matt Godbolt episode, Godbolt's Rule.

Also, here's a bunch of talks that I've given:

• ​I Built an AI Running Coach — PyTexas, Austin
• ​When AI Agents Meet Production Infrastructure — SCaLE 23x, Pasadena
• ​Bridge Agents and Infrastructure — MCP Academy PNW, Bellevue

My personal website is also updated and covers everything I've been up to and where I'm going next.

There will be an improved Bitter Lesson episode coming out shortly and new podcast episode at the beginning of August.

Thanks,

Adam

​@adamgordonbell​

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