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.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

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.

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

Related Changelog episodes* Rebuilding DevOps from the ground up * From Chef to System Initiative * From Chef to System Initiative (remastered) * The war for the soul of open source * OSCON

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!