Building with AI The First Step on Your AI Journey Is Encoding What You Already Know Every company has this person. The engineer who every production change flows through because they're the only one who knows the constraints. If you're thinking about putting AI agents anywhere near your infrastructure, encoding what that person knows is the first problem to solve.
Building with AI Intent Is The New Architecture The sovereign cloud movement is forcing a question the industry has been avoiding. When you have to move off a hyperscaler, the bottleneck isn't the new provider's APIs. It's how precisely you can express what you actually need. Intent is becoming the architecture that matters most.
Building with AI High Trust Teams With Agents Are Unstoppable High trust doesn't mean no guardrails. It means everyone understands the direction well enough to act independently within it. When you pair that with the right systems, every person on the team can advance the product every day.
Building with AI The Rearchitecture Your Team Could Never Justify Every codebase has the rearchitecture that never gets prioritised. We split ours into six parallel workstreams and shipped it in eight days, start to finish. The hard part wasn't speed. It was coordination.
Building with AI When Building Is Easy, the Danger Is Building Everything When agents can build anything in an afternoon, the temptation is to build everything. The products that survive are the ones where someone had the discipline to say no.
Building with AI Take the Leap Before You Are Pushed The fear of AI replacing your work is real. So is the shift. The teams that build structure around agents instead of resisting or rushing find the job gets better, not smaller.
Building with AI The Code Was Never the Job Five of us build swamp. None of us write code. Agents write it, review it, test the binary. The work didn't shrink — it shifted to the decisions that were always the most valuable.
Building with AI Your Agent Is Starving Five people, $3,000/month, zero lines written manually. GitHub just moved to per-token billing. The era of flat-rate pricing absorbing your agent's inefficiency is ending. Your agent isn't the bottleneck. What you're feeding it is.
Building with AI The Community Pull Request Is Dead The PR-as-contribution model was built for a world where writing code was the bottleneck. AI agents broke that assumption. GitHub shipped a kill switch on PRs. Hashimoto built Vouch. We closed the door entirely. The community pull request is dead. Here's what replaces it.
Building with AI Agent Trust Is a System Design Problem Most people hit "always allow" within the first hour. Agent trust is a system design problem, not a containment problem. Three layers of permissions, conventions, and context let the agent work autonomously where it's safe and stop it at the boundaries that matter.
Building with AI The Gate Between Our Agent Code and Our Users Every release binary gets dispatched to a separate repo running CLI tests, adversarial security tests, and benchmarks. Three recent bugs — all with full unit test suites passing — never reached a user because the UAT caught them in minutes.
Building with AI Anatomy of a Swamp PR Agents open PRs in our repo. Other agents review them. That means untrusted input flowing through models with merge authority — so we built a pipeline with four independent AI reviews, scoped tools, and a security review that watches the reviewers.
Building with AI The Vibes Don't Scale Vibe coding works great for the first few PRs. Then you do it two hundred more times and the codebase quietly stops making sense. The fix isn't better prompts — it's building a machine that compounds.
Swamp Skills Are Context, and Context Needs Tests Skills are context. They're the thing an agent reads before it decides how to use swamp. If the skills are wrong, everything downstream is wrong — so we test them in CI the same way we test code, using tessl for quality and promptfoo for routing, across every model we care about.
Swamp The Lifecycle of a Swamp Issue We use swamp to build swamp. That sounds like marketing until you look at how an issue actually moves through our process — not as a GitHub thread with comments piling up, but as a state machine with versioned plans, adversarial reviews, and checks that refuse to let the agent skip steps.
Swamp Deploying Ghost on DigitalOcean with Swamp I asked Claude to build me a blog on DigitalOcean and it worked hand in hand with Swamp to build one!
