Adam Gordon Bell

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Community Engineer at Pulumi, host of the CoRecursive podcast, conference speaker, and writer of widely-read guides on AWK, JQ, and infrastructure tools.

Adam Gordon Bell

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I’m Adam. I’m a software engineer at Pulumi, I host the CoRecursive podcast, and I speak at conferences when I have something worth saying. Based in Peterborough, Canada, working remotely since 2011.

The best way to reach me is email — adam@corecursive.com. I read them all, though I’m sometimes slow to respond.

If you’d rather lurk, I send a newsletter every few weeks with what I’m writing, recording, and reading. Signup form is at the bottom of every page.

Elsewhere: GitHub · LinkedIn · Bluesky · Twitter · CoRecursive.

Upcoming

Recent Podcasts

  • podcast The Hutter Prize
    · Aug 2026

    I texted Don about a side gig: €5,000 for every 1% you shave off a zip file. It's a real contest. For 20 years, Marcus Hutter has offered €500,000 to anyone who can losslessly compress a gigabyte of Wikipedia small enough. Gzip gets you to 322. After that you're on your own. So we tried. Run-length encoding. Pointing back instead of repeating yourself. Huffman coding worked out by hand. Arithmetic coding, which spends less than one bit per character. Then Claude Shannon's 1951 guessing game, and a paper where an LLM beats every record and still wins nothing, because the model counts against you. Don wanted the euros. I had other reasons for bringing him over.

  • podcast The Bitter Lesson
    · Jun 2026

    I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, but to understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program built out of plain conditionals get better on its own? So late one night I sent Don a paper, reward is enough. The claim is that all of intelligence, the whole thing, comes down to a system maximizing a reward. So we backed up through the history to find out how far "reward is enough" really goes: B.F. Skinner training pigeons, a backgammon program that taught itself, the Go move no human would have played. It's a story about machine learning, and what that leaves for the rest of us who still do it by hand.

  • podcast The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It
    · May 2026

    I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for months. Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know it would unquestionably end. There's only one internet, and the data isn't growing. The frontier labs call this the pre-training wall. A leaked Google memo from 2023 argued they had no moat. R1 is on GitHub. Llama is on Hugging Face. OpenAI's secondary-market valuation has climbed past $850 billion. Don kept asking what, exactly, that $850 billion was buying. So he came over and we made an episode about it.

Recent Writing

  • article Beyond the Hyperscalers: What Actually Protects You
    · Sep 2026

    Three people who have priced leaving AWS spent an hour arguing about cloud sovereignty. Here is the recording, and the advice each of them gave.

  • article Kubernetes Agent Sandbox: What It Is and How to Deploy It with Pulumi
    · Jul 2026

    Agent Sandbox gives AI agents kernel-isolated, disposable environments as Kubernetes resources. Here's what it is and how to deploy it on GKE with Pulumi.

  • newsletter Talking It Out with Don
    · Jul 2026

    ( 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…

Recent Talks

Recent Videos