The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

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 discussionChangelog++ 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, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow 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!

Bitwarden’s CLI got hit by the Checkmarx supply-chain campaign, TypeScript 7.0 beta lands with the Go-rewritten compiler running ~10x faster than 6.0, and pgBackRest lost its maintainer of thirteen years leaving anyone running production Postgres with a real dependency-trust task this week. We’ve also got Ubuntu 26.04 LTS shipping with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, and Matz dropping Spinel as an AOT path that takes Ruby to native binaries. This week was a good reminder that the tools we depend on are all moving at once. Security, performance, and maintenance aren’t isolated threads. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members save 2 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. Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Today on the show I’m talking with Amelia Wattenberger — designer, data-viz veteran, ex-GitHub Next, and now designing Intent at Augment Code. What if the last 30% of any software project is about to become the hardest part you’ve ever done? That’s the argument Amelia is making today. We discuss the identity crisis developers are having as agents take over the keyboard, the epic redesign of developer tooling in this agent-first world, the arc from autocomplete to chat to CLI back to UI, why Intent treats a workspace as their core primitive not a chat thread, the tradeoffs between one-worktree-per-agent vs. one-worktree-per-task, and why she thinks prototyping just got easier but finishing got harder. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:WorkOS – Auth for CLI with AuthKit from WorkOS — Bring secure browser-based login to your terminal apps using the OAuth Device Flow, with the same polished AuthKit experience plus SSO, MFA, and passkeys. Learn more at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com NordLayer – Toggle-ready network security for modern businesses. Get an exclusive offer: up to 22% off NordLayer yearly plans plus 10% on top with the coupon code changelog-10-NORDLAYER. Try it risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee at nordlayer.com/thechangelog 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:Amelia Wattenberger – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: GitHub Copilot — the launch that kicked off this era (mentioned ~12×) GitHub Next — GitHub’s R&D team; where Amelia worked GitHub Actions Intent — Augment Code’s new workspace-first agent app that Amelia is building (the core product discussion) Augie — Augment’s agent Claude Code Codex Notion AI VS Code Incus — system-level containers/VMs; the Canonical LXD fork Proxmox — Adam’s hypervisor platform for the sandbox ZFS — storage layer Incus is built on Bun — JavaScript runtime Rust Go Ruby on Rails SvelteKit Svelte TypeScript TanStack Start Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Astral is joining OpenAI, which says a lot about where the center of gravity is moving for developer tools, LiteLLM got hit by a nasty supply-chain attack, and OpenCode blew up as the latest serious open source swing at the coding-agent stack. We’ve also got Rust doing a very public reality check on its own pain points, WorkOS pushing AuthKit into CLI auth, Ryan Lizza using AI to build an open source TurboTax alternative, and a fresh httpx fork that turns open source maintenance drama into a real dependency story. If nothing else, this week was a good reminder that tools, trust, and control all move together. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members save 1 minute on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:WorkOS – Auth for CLI with AuthKit from WorkOS — Bring secure browser-based login to your terminal apps using the OAuth Device Flow, with the same polished AuthKit experience plus SSO, MFA, and passkeys. Learn more at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Adam talks with Tailscale co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer David Carney about where Tailscale is headed next: TSIDP, TSNet, multiple tailnets, and Aperture. They get into clickless auth (via TSIDP), TSNet apps, multiple tailnets for isolation and control, and Aperture, Tailscale’s private AI gateway for API key management, observability, and agent security. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Augment Code – Adam loves “Auggie” – Augment Code’s CLI that brings Augment’s context engine and powerful AI reasoning anywhere your code goes. From building alongside you in the terminal to any part of your development workflow. NordLayer – Toggle-ready network security for modern businesses. Get an exclusive offer: up to 22% off NordLayer yearly plans plus 10% on top with the coupon code changelog-10-NORDLAYER. Try it risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee at nordlayer.com/thechangelog Squarespace – Turn your expertise into a business with the all-in-one platform for websites, services, and getting paid. Use code CHANGELOG to save 10% on your first website purchase. 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:David Carney – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Send an email to David ~> [email protected] Mentioned in this episode Tailscale Aperture by Tailscale TSIDP TSNet Multiple tailnets Tailnet policy file syntax Model Context Protocol (MCP) MCP specification Proxmox VE Incus OIDC / OpenID Connect OAuth 2.0 Okta Microsoft Entra ID Google Workspace Keycloak Salesforce Anthropic Amazon Bedrock Oso Cerbos Go GopherCon Simon Willison Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!