Matthew Sanabria

Things Matthew Says on Podcasts

An engineering leader at Oxide Computer who focuses on building reliable, observable systems, and a member of the Go community group GoBridge. He co-hosts Fallthrough, a weekly software engineering podcast with Kris Brandow, Ian Wester-Lopshire and Dylan Bourque, where the group argues through the week's AI, tooling and open source news with a skeptical, detail-first take rather than hype. He has also guested on The Changelog and Oxide and Friends, talking through the same infrastructure and Go language territory he covers on his own show.

Where to Find Them

Matthew Sanabria hosts Fallthrough . They have also been a guest on The Changelog (3 times) and Oxide and Friends .

Recently: “A Change Is Gonna Come” on Fallthrough (October 2026); “The Tortoise and the Agent” on Fallthrough (October 2026); “Git Out” on Fallthrough (October 2026); “Close Encounters of the Human Kind” on Fallthrough (October 2026); “Keep Your Enemies Closer” on Fallthrough (October 2026); “Apocalypse Not Now” on Fallthrough (September 2026).

What They Said

“I like to have humans review things mostly for context sharing. … If I ask you to review some code, sure, you might find some stuff, but now we're sharing context about what we're even working on. … With LLMs, they're just going to be like, you told me to write feature XYZ exactly like this. You told me to review it. Looks good. Goodbye. And I think we're going to miss some of that context sharing if we just let LLMs write the code and review it and merge it quickly.” — Matthew Sanabria, Fallthrough

Responding to the guest's description of his team's AI policy, Sanabria argues that the main value of human code review is spreading knowledge of what the team is building, more than catching bugs.

Fallthrough · 2026-10-31 Permalink → Listen →
Fallthrough Around 44:04 into the episode
Matthew Sanabria

control with your with your monologues. I like it. I have to do Chris's right.

Nick Gerace

…write very little code myself. And I have a bunch of guardrails. And you can go to my monorepo on my website. And that has, you can see my whole change log. I'm very public about how I'm using agents right now. And I try to keep those commits well described. But yeah, that's a bit of how we use it.

Matthew Sanabria

…in a similar boat. I like to have humans review things mostly for context sharing, right? So that like you're aware that we're building this or that we're making these decisions, not necessarily because they're always going to catch something that the LLM is not going to catch. So, it's weird. I like that because there's a context-sharing aspect that nobody really talks about where it's like, if I ask you to review some code, sure, you might find some stuff, but now we're sharing context about what we're even working on. So, you're like, oh, Matt's working on feature XYZ. Like, yeah, actually, I had a thought about feature XYZ that Matt didn't really understand. And we can have that conversation. But if with LLMs, they're just going to be like, you told me to write feature XYZ exactly like this. You told me to review it. Looks good. Goodbye. And I don't know. I think we're going to miss some of that context…

Nick Gerace

So, what's interesting is, with a little more nuance, what I was saying earlier, I was letting it write comments and pros for a long time. And this is only like a week-long experiment. And some of the comments that have been suggested in the interactive model with the agents, I'm like, ow, yeah, I…

Matthew Sanabria

mine, except for it telling it to call me Mr. Synabria, and it works really well.

Nick Gerace

Well, and honestly, that's probably better than mine, which is probably way too verbose. But I get mad at something, I try to make sure it doesn't happen again. I use a rules file. And when these agents are, you know, I was talking to Steve Klavnik, and I get, it's funny, in Slack, I vented, it…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“…I'm not wasting my time reading things that you didn't waste your time writing.” — Matthew Sanabria, Fallthrough

Sanabria had just described his new habit of running any blog post he is sent through Pangram, an AI-detection tool, and abandoning anything that comes back flagged. His co-host Kris Brandow immediately agreed he was heading for the same paid tier. The line is the rule Sanabria has settled on rather than a complaint about any particular writer.

Fallthrough · 2026-09-12 Permalink → Listen →
Fallthrough Around 14:57 into the episode
Matthew Sanabria

…whatever it was, the little attributes for it. And then on two of them, it was like, this is load bearing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is load-bearing. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I, I wanted to like hurt my computer. You know what I mean? I'm so mad, irrationally mad too. Oh,

Kris Brandow

God, this is a load. Or this, oh, this is a seam. This is a scene. This is a seam.

Matthew Sanabria

And I see now I'm at the point now where if you publish a blog post or a post, I'm probably going to run it through Pangram. And if it comes back with a large AI like response, I'm just not reading it. I'm just, that's, I'm done. I can't, I can't do this anymore. I'm not wasting my time reading things that you didn't waste your time writing.

Kris Brandow

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I feel like I'm going to wind up in that $65 a month Pangaram Planes. I'm going to be like, no, we're going to run everything through it. I'm not going to sit here and read through like AI generated, like completely AI generated stuff. Cause like, why? And I'm also not going to…

Matthew Sanabria

face. Yeah. I just want to know why. Like, what do you, what, it,

Kris Brandow

yeah, I'm going to know.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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