Changelog & Friends

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!

Adam and Jerod get into the news, Jerod officially retires from the pod (and Changelog), plus a bonus for our Changelog++ subs! Join the discussion Changelog++ members get a bonus 16 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. 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. 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. Notion – Custom Agents that automate the busywork so your team can focus on real work. Try them free at notion.com/changelog Featuring: Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - Ladybird The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler Become an Oxc Sponsor | The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler Boshen (@boshen_c) / X Am I the only one who genuinely prefers on-prem? : r/devops The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead | Boris Tane THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS Anish Acharya on X: “a different way this could go down…” The Mythical Agent-Month – Wes McKinney NanoClaw - Secure AI Agent for WhatsApp, Telegram & More Zed — Agent Client Protocol Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Our ol’ friend, Brett Cannon, is back to talk all things Python. But first! Star Wars, Machete Order, Lost, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, Murderbot, Ted Lasso, Project Hail Mary, David Attenborough, perpetual voice rights, and the AI uncanny valley. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price. Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. 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: Brett Cannon – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: What is the Star Wars Machete Order? Pep 665 (lock file format) python-build-standalone Astral: high-performance Python tooling Pypi: Page Not Found Incus documentation Python/prebuilt-cpython Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Amal Hussein returns to tell us all about her new role at Istari, what life is like outside the web browser, how she’s helping ambitious orgs in aerospace, what the SDLC looks like in 2026, and a whole lot more. Wait, moon vacuums?! Join the discussion Changelog++ members get a bonus 21 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today! Sponsors: Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price. 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 Featuring: Amal Hussein – GitHub, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Istari: level the digital playing field AWS Re:invent keynote Blue Origin Frictionless book Jevons paradox Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

We discuss the buzz around Clawdbot / MoltBot / OpenClaw, how app subscriptions are turning into weekend hacking projects, why SaaS stocks are crashing on Wall Street, and what it all means. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price. Squarespace – A website makes it real! Use code CHANGELOG to save 10% on your first website purchase. Featuring: Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: OpenClaw — personal AI assistant Mintlify Macrumors Buyer’s Guide: Mac Mini Your app subscription is now my weekend project The future of software engineering is SRE Why SaaS stocks are crashing on Wall Street Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!