The Origin of crushr¶
Chronicles entry — originally published externally and preserved here as a historical milestone.
Context¶
- Project: crushr
- Series: Chronicles
- Status: Historical snapshot
- Original venue: LinkedIn
crushr started with a sarcastic prompt.
Back in February, I got nostalgic after seeing Martin Starr, aka Bertram Gilfoyle, pop up in something I was watching. If you’ve seen Silicon Valley, you know the type—competent, cynical, allergic to nonsense.
Always liked that character. Personal hero.
A couple days later I opened ChatGPT and typed this:
“I was watching this documentary about a company called Pied Piper. They invented middle-out compression. I want you to write me a middle-out compression application for Linux.”
For the record: - I knew it wasn’t a documentary - I knew middle-out compression wasn’t real
I was curious how it would respond.
It didn’t play along.
It corrected me. Then it explained why it wasn’t real.
That should’ve been the end of it.
It wasn’t.
The Turn¶
The conversation shifted almost immediately:
- What actually goes wrong with archives?
- What happens when data is partially corrupted?
- Why do tools assume everything is intact?
- What can you prove vs what are you just hoping is still correct?
At some point, the problem stopped being compression.
It became:
what can you still trust when things break?
That’s a very different problem.
The Line That Stuck¶
One idea came out of that early back-and-forth and never left:
Don’t guess.
If a file name, path, or piece of metadata can’t be proven from the archive, don’t pretend you know it.
That sounds obvious. It isn’t how most tools behave.
Most assume: - metadata is valid - structure is intact - failure is rare
crushr assumes the opposite: - things fail - data gets damaged - and partial truth is still useful if you treat it honestly
From Joke to Direction¶
There was no plan to build anything.
This wasn’t: - “let’s design a new archive format” - or “let’s compete with tar”
It was a sarcastic prompt that turned into a real problem worth solving.
Over time, that turned into:
- strict verification instead of blind trust
- recovery that separates what’s provable from what’s not
- archives that aren’t black boxes
- and a design that assumes failure is normal, not exceptional
Compression ended up being the least interesting part.
The Honest Version¶
crushr exists because:
- I threw a sarcastic prompt at ChatGPT
- it refused to play along
- and the correction was more interesting than the joke
If it had just said “sure, here’s your middle-out compressor,” this wouldn’t exist.
Instead, it was:
“That’s not real. Here’s what is.”
Turns out that was the better starting point.
Watch out, Hooli. No signatures required.