Automation at the speed of Swamp (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.
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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.
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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!
Agentic infra changes everything (Interview)
Adam Jacob joins us to discuss how agentic systems for building and managing infrastructure have fundamentally altered how he thinks about everything, including the last six years of his life. Along the way, he opines on the recent AWS outage, debates whether we’re in an AI-induced bubble, quells any concerns of AGI and a robot uprising, eats some humble pie, and more.
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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.
Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Anthropic on agentic misalignment
System Initiative
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
From Chef to System Initiative (remastered) (Interview)
The epic show with Adam Jacob has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Adam goes solo with Adam Jacob for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up and enjoy.
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Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
System Initiative
Ximian
Any Given Sunday speech
I’ll Devour You! (I shall look forward to the fight)
RIP Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Writing Code About Your Infrastructure? That's a Losing Race
Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative, discusses a shift in infrastructure automation—moving from writing code to building models that enable rapid simulations and collaboration. In The New Stack Makers, he compares this approach to Formula One racing, where teams use high-fidelity models to simulate race conditions, optimizing performance before hitting the track.
System Initiative applies this concept to enterprise automation, creating a model that understands how infrastructure components interact. This enables fast, multiplayer feedback loops, simplifying complex tasks while enhancing collaboration. Engineers can extend the system by writing small, reactive JavaScript functions that automate processes, such as transforming existing architectures into new ones. The platform visually represents these transformations, making automation more intuitive and efficient.
By leveraging models instead of traditional code-based infrastructure management, System Initiative enhances agility, reduces complexity, and improves DevOps collaboration. To explore how this ties into the concept of the digital twin, listen to the fullNew Stack Makers episode.
Learn more from The New Stack about System Initiative:
Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live
How System Initiative Treats AWS Components as Digital Twins
System Initiative Code Now Open Source
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From Chef to System Initiative (Friends)
Adam Jacob goes solo with Adam for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up. This is a different flavor of “Friends” for you. Enjoy.
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Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
System Initiative
Ximian
Any Given Sunday speech
I’ll Devour You! (I shall look forward to the fight)
RIP Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The ol' hot & juicy (Friends)
Frequent guest (and almost real-life-friend) Adam Jacob returns to share his spicy takes on all the recent “open source meets business” drama. We also take some time to catch up on the state of his open source-based business, System Initiative.
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Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 90,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
IBM to Acquire HashiCorp, Inc.
Matt Asay on OpenTofu
System Initiative
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The cofounder of Chef is cooking up a less painful DevOps
Adam is the cofounder and former CTO of Chef, which provides DevOps automation tools that help configure, deploy, and manage application infrastructure, including security and compliance.
Adam’s new venture, System Initiative, reimagines infrastructure-as-code as collaborative, open-source software. See what they’re up to on their blog, starting with Adam’s article DevOps without papercuts.
If you’re interested in playing with a developer build of System Initiative, submit your information here. You can also join System Initiative on Discord (and keep an eye on their open positions).
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn or Twitter.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Rebuilding DevOps from the ground up (Interview)
This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob and we’re talking about his mission at System Initiative to rebuild DevOps. They are out of stealth mode and ready to show off their transformative new power tool that reimagines what’s possible from DevOps. It’s an intelligent automation platform that allows DevOps teams to build detailed interactive simulations of their infrastructure and use them to rapidly update their production environments.
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DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
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Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
System Initiative
System Initiative launch demo
What if Infrastructure as Code never existed, by Adam Jacob
10+ deploys per day at Flickr
Changelog Interviews #353: The war for the soul of open source
Changelog Interviews #460: The business model of open source
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The business model of open source (Interview)
This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.
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InfluxDB – InfluxDB empowers developers to build IoT, analytics, and monitoring software. It’s purpose-built to handle massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure. Learn about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Read this Twitter thread from Adam Jacob
The Changelog #353: The war for the soul of open source featuring Adam Jacob
The Changelog #429: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS (a deep dive on the business of open source)
Progress Announces Acquisition of Chef
Chef co-founder and CTO Adam Jacob stepping down, will remain on board of directors
Tailwind CSS
Why We’re Relicensing CockroachDB
Founders Talk #75: The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience
featuring Spencer Kimball, CEO & Co-founder of Cockroach Labs
System Initiative
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Venture Capital Isn’t as Evil as Twitter Thinks with Adam Jacob
About Adam Jacob
Adam Jacob is a co-founder of Chef Software and the creator of Chef. He has over a decade of experience designing, building, and managing large production systems. Adam is Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of The System Initiative.
Before Chef Software, he founded HJK Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy where he built production cloud infrastructures. Adam has been responsible for large production systems, internal corporate automation, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts.
Links Referenced
Twitter: @adamhjk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjacob/
Personal site: https://sfosc.org
Company site: https://www.systeminit.com
The war for the soul of open source (Interview)
Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef) joins the show to talk about the keynote he’s giving at OSCON this week. The keynote is titled “The war for the soul of open source.” We talked about what made open source great in the first place, what went wrong, the pitfalls of open core models, licensing, and more.
By the way, we’re at OSCON this week so if you make your way to the expo hall, make sure you come by our booth and say hi.
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Featuring:
Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
You can now watch Adam’s OSCON keynote on his YouTube channel.
“The war for the soul of open source”
Chef
Goodbye Open Core — Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish
“So happy that @chef is now a 100% open source company. They are done being open core, and I have to say, I’m stoked about it. It aligns the company with its core values in a way that is so much more elegant and understandable.”
996 License
Utility monster on Wikipedia
Why we’re relicensing CockroachDB
Redis will remain BSD licensed
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!