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.
Featuring
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.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Notes & Links
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
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
Related Changelog episodes
Chapters
| Chapter Number | Chapter Start Time | Chapter Title | Chapter Duration |
| 1 | 00:00 | Welcome to The Changelog | 00:38 |
| 2 | 00:38 | Sponsor: Coder.com | 03:08 |
| 3 | 03:46 | Reconnecting with Adam Jacob | 02:54 |
| 4 | 06:39 | AI is changing what's possible in software | 05:43 |
| 5 | 12:23 | Abstration layers are increasing | 02:50 |
| 6 | 15:13 | How do I know if I did a good job today? | 02:07 |
| 7 | 17:19 | What happens when key system contraints change dramatically? | 04:04 |
| 8 | 21:23 | From a team of 18 to a team of 5 with AI | 06:26 |
| 9 | 27:50 | The loop from implementation planning to user acceptance testing | 00:40 |
| 10 | 28:30 | Why did you bring back UAT? | 02:23 |
| 11 | 30:53 | Implementation Plan Walkthrough | 03:37 |
| 12 | 34:30 | Writing specs vs writing design docs | 02:47 |
| 13 | 37:17 | Swamp.club! | 03:45 |
| 14 | 41:01 | What Swamp does | 04:40 |
| 15 | 45:42 | Would you call Swamp an AI harness? | 00:45 |
| 16 | 46:27 | Who is Swamp for? | 00:42 |
| 17 | 47:09 | How would Swamp build automation for Proxmox? | 04:59 |
| 18 | 52:08 | What capabilites for Swamp are you exploring next? | 02:48 |
| 19 | 54:56 | Sponsor: Tailscale | 02:35 |
| 20 | 57:31 | Why did you name it Swamp? | 01:23 |
| 21 | 58:54 | How do you level up in Swamp? | 01:03 |
| 22 | 59:57 | How do I get started with Swamp? | 04:39 |
| 23 | 1:04:36 | Adam tries Swamp live | 11:43 |
| 24 | 1:16:19 | What tools like Swamp mean for the future of automation | 01:20 |
| 25 | 1:17:39 | Are there any limitations to what Swamp can automate? | 01:02 |
| 26 | 1:18:41 | Nerding out on what these tools mean for the future of software | 06:42 |
| 27 | 1:25:22 | Why Adam Jacob is excited about the future with Swamp | 00:28 |
| 28 | 1:25:50 | Is Swamp anything like OpenClaw? | 00:28 |
| 29 | 1:26:18 | What are some unusual things you can ask Swamp to do? | 04:01 |
| 30 | 1:30:20 | Using Swamp to deploy software to different cloud platforms | 01:28 |
| 31 | 1:31:47 | How do you convince people that Swamp is production ready? | 06:08 |
| 32 | 1:37:55 | Sponsor: RWX | 02:42 |
| 33 | 1:40:37 | What part of the software lifecycle will be compressed/collapsed by Swamp? | 05:36 |
| 34 | 1:46:13 | Things are feeling pretty uncomfortable | 04:19 |
| 35 | 1:50:32 | Adam Jacob's advice for navigating the future of software engineering | 03:51 |
| 36 | 1:54:23 | Software development isn't dead. It's just changing very fast. | 00:48 |
| 37 | 1:55:11 | Book recommendations!! | 04:16 |
| 38 | 1:59:27 | Swamp IS NOT open to contributions | 03:58 |
| 39 | 2:03:25 | How will agentic development impact team sizes? | 06:19 |
| 40 | 2:09:44 | Speculation on the future of the software industry | 03:24 |
| 41 | 2:13:08 | Building for people outside of Silicon Valley | 02:39 |
| 42 | 2:15:46 | Everything is being reinvented. Opportunities are out there. | 08:21 |
| 43 | 2:24:07 | We're out | 00:38 |
| 44 | 2:24:45 | Closing thoughts and stuff | 01:13 |