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Automation at the speed of Swamp

The Changelog Developers & Open Source Score 7/10

Summary

This week I'm talking with Adam Jacob, founder of System Initiative and creator of Swamp, about what happens when AI agents change the entire shape of software development. We discuss how he went from an 18-person team down to five and shipped Swamp 900 times in four weeks, why he brought User Acceptance Testing (UAT) testing back from the 90s, why software architecture (and domain-driven design) suddenly matters more than knowing how to write code, the live demo where I pointed Swamp at my Proxmox box and watched it write its own automation (blew my mind!!), and why he'll never accept a pull request to Swamp, ever.

Original Text

This week I’m talking with Adam Jacob, founder of System Initiative and creator of Swamp, about what happens when AI agents change the entire shape of software development. We discuss how he went from an 18-person team down to five and shipped Swamp 900 times in four weeks, why he brought User Acceptance Testing (UAT) testing back from the 90s, why software architecture (and domain-driven design) suddenly matters more than knowing how to write code, the live demo where I pointed Swamp at my Proxmox box and watched it write its own automation (blew my mind!!), and why he’ll never accept a pull request to Swamp, ever.

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Sponsors:

Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.

Tailscale – Adam loves Tailscale! Easy, secure, identity-based access to anything. Tailscale deploys quickly and enables Zero Trust access to any resource on your network. From CI/CD runners across multi-cloud environments, to SaaS tools and infrastructure, Tailscale connects it all, seamlessly.

RWX – CI/CD platform for high velocity teams. When agents help developers write code in minutes, validation becomes your bottleneck. RWX gives agents programmatic control, sub-second cached builds, and semantic outputs they can act on. No commit required. Just iterate until CI passes, then push.

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Featuring:

Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X

Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Featured

Swamp Club

Swamp manual

Swamp extensions

Swamp leaderboard

Swamp on GitHub

Swamp extensions on GitHub

System Initiative

System Initiative on GitHub

AI coding tools

Claude Code

Claude Code docs

OpenAI Codex CLI

Codex on GitHub

Infrastructure and automation

Chef Infra

Proxmox VE

QEMU

Grafana

Honeycomb

Better Auth

TypeScript

Talos Linux

Ubiquiti

DigitalOcean

Hetzner Cloud

Amazon S3

Incus

Kubernetes

Developer platforms and companies

GitHub

GitLab

Block

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