Show Your Work

Taylor Dolezal has spent his career where infrastructure meets community: HashiCorp, then Head of Ecosystem at the CNCF, now Head of Open Source Software at Dosu.

The cold open is his worry in one line. For months his commit history sat near zero, tens of commits a week. A device in his family room now shows the trailing thirty days: 2,700 commits. Over the same stretch, GitHub issues and discussions are measurably down. The code still lands. The reasoning behind it stops being written anywhere anyone can read. "My math teacher would always say, show your work, and now I understand why."

Dosu's answer is a set of primitives. Notes are captured by hooks while you work a feature branch, and most get thrown away when the branch does. Topics are what notes compress into once a branch merges. Documents are the long-form layer, readable by people and by agents, that steers future work. Each has a lifetime: what the team did last week is worth a week or two, the company mission is worth a year or more.

Jake asks whether agents working in a repo should be treated as users, coworkers, bots or service accounts. Taylor sorts them by the work, and service accounts are where he hesitates: "When I want to do something like just check Google is up, I want to see the HTTP 200 OK response. I don't want to spend tokens on that." Pull out whatever can be made deterministic, and keep the models for the rest.

The bet he says might not pay off is locally hosted, open-weight models, small enough to own. Behind it: today's tokens are subsidized, and he is fearful of a future where "your $200 a month bill becomes 2,000, 20,000" and the capability goes with it. So he is crystallizing what he can while it is cheap. His CEO's line for it: rent the intelligence, keep the knowledge.

Also in the episode: All Good, the iOS app he built to watch status pages across the frontier labs; tldraw shutting down pull requests altogether; the agentic bill of materials he wants to exist; whether left-pad-sized packages survive; where prose still gives the models away; and what he wants for Gen Alpha, which is arithmetic before the calculator. He puts himself at 75, maybe 80 percent optimistic, and says what the rest is.