I am thrilled to tell you that Swamp Club has raised $7m in seed funding from @AmplifyPartners, Encoded Ventures, @jesserobbins, and @stolinski. Swamp is a platform for building AI systems from repeatable behaviors, rather than from token-hungry agent-centric designs. More exciting to me than the money (which I'm stoked about,) or the product itself (which continues to surprise and delight me every day,) is the incredible group of people who have started solving real, practical, everyday problems with Swamp. They teach me new and exciting things about how to build with AI every day. I'm grateful to my co-founders, who have poured every ounce of their creativity, passion, and intelligence into Swamp. I'm grateful to our users and customers (big and small) - there is no greater gift you can give to an entrepreneur than the validation that comes with voting with your wallets. And I'm grateful to our investors, who see the opportunity we see, and want to make it happen with us. It's such a cliche to say that there has never been a better time to build - but really, it feels like there has never been a better time to build. Come join the Club. swamp-club.com/press/swamp-u…

Here’s the truth about where the industry is at with AI adoption: most of it is awful, and most of us are suffering under the weight of it. Early on, the bet was that the models are really smart and we will just chuck everything at them and let it sort it all out. This has largely led to incredibly wasteful, in-reproducible solutions - like huge skills and MCP, where the agent re-solves your problem a million times, getting it right some percentage often. Turns out it’s hard to get that to produce real value beyond individual experiences. As engineers, we have struggled to get our heads around how to use these capabilities effectively. Is it the harness? An agent? A factory? A tool call? Maybe a skill? How about a dark factory! We need RAG! No, RAG sucks, we need… you get my point. Everyone needs to take a breath, and start thinking about this new capability as a component of your systems, rather than the substrate upon which your systems get rebuilt. Meanwhile, coding agents got fucking fantastic. But for most of us, we changed nothing about our SDLC except that now we should be doing it all faster, because agents. That leads us to be stuck like a surfer in the chop - being responsible for everything but in control of nothing, with an avalanche of code nobody looked at when they wrote it, but that you’re responsible for ensuring doesn’t break the world. Luckily, we can stop the madness spiral. Breathe. We can engineer our way out of this problem. Are you working on how to use AI to improve your SDLC? If so, start by looking at how it works now, and using AI to automate it. Where in the process do you need intelligence? Is it there. How much do you need? Use that to decide your model. Encode the standards. Swamp, and primitives like it, are a part of how you do that. They solve problems like how to break the problem down into reusable components, how to store data, how to build the contract between components, how to string them into workflows, and how to expose that to agents, ui, or whatever you want. The way out of the suffering is to turn our engineering brains back on, and start building in ways that enable and support the future.

The thing that should be on top of everyone's mind right now, based on the Bun port to Rust, is that you can put that same amount of effort into *refactoring and fixing your existing architecture*. Things that were previously far too dangerous or invasive, that would've taken months of effort for teams, can be done in days. You can say the code it generated was "slop" - which, okay, fine. It's slop. Guess what? We can improve on that foundation at the same rate. The refactoring rate is off the charts. Build comprehensive UAT, so that the product doesn't regress - which you can build and maintain now, because the rate at which you can produce it has increased so dramatically. You would never have built it with humans, because it would have ground your velocity to a halt, and everyone would've hated living under its yolk. But now? All those engineering instincts about how the system could be better, if only you could refactor it with what you know now? It's days of effort. Of course in order to actually work that way, you have to *also* give up the fact that you understand the architecture through understanding every line of code. If you have a team who understood the code base in one shape, then they wake up tomorrow and it's a new shape, that's a brand new kind of trust and alignment problem. Of course your agents understand it, because they will ingest all that context anyway. This is how Swamp ships bug fixes on average within 4 hours of them being reported. A new version of swamp ships 7 times a day, on average. The rate of improvement is the highest I've ever experienced. We haven't given up on engineering discipline. We've moved it from working on the software we produce (swamp) to working on the machine that produces it. We understand deeply how swamp works. We evolve it over time. The code is an artifact of that understanding, rather than the other way round.

Stoked to be working with the Cloud Life team! businesswire.com/news/home/2…