Swamp - The View from the AI Frontier

The View from the AI Frontier

Swamp

anything Swamp-related, whether internals or demos

Skill testing pipeline: eight swamp skills pass through tessl and promptfoo CI gates, then weekly regression across sonnet, opus, gpt-5.4, and gemini-2.5-pro.

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.

The swamp-club lifecycle view for a single issue, showing each phase and the agent event stages inside it.

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.

A split terminal showing a swamp model method dispatching to a Docker container, with driver config on the left and live execution logs on the right.

Execution Drivers in Swamp

Swamp model methods can run anywhere — directly in the host process, in a Docker container, or in a custom driver you write yourself. This post covers how execution drivers work, how config cascades from model to workflow to CLI, and how to build your own.

Left pane shows the workflow running, right pane shows S3 sync in real time — that's the datastore abstraction doing its job.

How We Built Datastores in Swamp

Swamp tracks everything at runtime — model state, workflow runs, audit logs. For a while that lived in .swamp/ in the repo. It fell apart the moment we wanted a team sharing state. So we built a proper datastore abstraction with S3, distributed locking, and a local cache.

iTerm2-style terminal window showing a swamp workflow run command deploying Ghost to DigitalOcean, with green-highlighted input flags.

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!