Bug reports that looked like noise turned out to be 3 compounding root causes underneath. We rearchitected the whole thing in 8 days, multiple agents working together. If it failed, we lost 8 days. Previously this would've been a 6 month project unprioritised. stack72.dev/the-rearchit...

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 coordin...

stack72.dev

Your backlog is not a product strategy. When every feature is an afternoon's work, the product that wins is the one where someone had the taste to say no. And that's not something an agent can help you with. stack72.dev/when-buildin...

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.

stack72.dev

I've been writing about how AI agents changed my work. Stopped typing code, started making better decisions, how we are building swamp with agents doing all the implementation. The fear is real. The shift is real. The difference is structure. stack72.dev/take-the-lea...

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.

stack72.dev

I haven't written code in months (probably for the best). Five of us build swamp, none of us write code manually. The job got bigger, not smaller. The code was never the job — the understanding was. New post up: stack72.dev/the-code-was...

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.

stack72.dev

Honest question for OSS maintainers: what percentage of the PRs you review this month were from someone who actually read the code they changed? GitHub shipped a kill switch for pull requests. That should tell you everything about where this is headed. stack72.dev/the-communit...

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 doo...

stack72.dev

I sorted every agent tool into two buckets: can git checkout undo it, or does it touch something external? Eliminated 90% of permission prompts. Kept the ones that matter like gh pr create. stack72.dev/agent-trust-...

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 autono...

stack72.dev

We test our code but we also test the thing users download. Separate repo, real compiled binary, CLI tests plus adversarial security and benchmarks. Three potential regressions that were caught in minutes before any user saw them. The next part of the machine: stack72.dev/the-gate-bet...

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...

stack72.dev

Agents open PRs in our repo. The diff is untrusted input flowing into models with merge authority. This is what dealing with agentic PRs actually looks like — multiple scoped AI reviews, each with a different job, including auditing changes to the pipeline itself. stack72.dev/anatomy-of-a...

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, a...

stack72.dev

Vibe coding breaks around PR #200*. Not dramatically — it just drifts. The fix isn't better prompts. It's building a machine that compounds. The vibes don't scale. stack72.dev/the-vibes-do... * There's no science at all to that 200 number - I made it up :D

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.

stack72.dev

The difference between an AI agent that helps you and one that guesses is context — the knowledge it loads before it does anything. We package that as skills in swamp, and test them in CI the same way we test code. stack72.dev/skills-are-c...

GitHub issues aren't a good fit for an agentic process, so we stopped using them. Plan versions, findings, and feedback rounds all collapsed into comment threads. We moved the lifecycle into swamp itself instead. stack72.dev/the-lifecycl...

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 ...

stack72.dev

Deployed Ghost on DigitalOcean with swamp — load balancer, Litestream SQLite replication, Certbot, DNSimple, all of it. The whole stack written by Claude using swamp as the guardrails. One workflow run to deploy, one to update. stack72.dev/deploying-gh...

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!

stack72.dev

Most of my writing has been for work so I haven’t really been thinking out loud in the same way. Getting back into that in a new blog. Starting with why I’ve gone all in on AI and how it’s actually affecting how I work day to day. I’ll share what I’m learning as I go. stack72.dev/ai-why-im-al...

AI: Why I'm All In

I'm an AI maximalist, and I think operations is about to get left behind: again. This blog is about closing that gap from the inside.

stack72.dev

I've talked to a few of you directly but if you are a UK or Europe based Azure User Group then I want to talk with you :) Get in contact as I'd love to talk more!

the OpenTofu to the CNCF github issue is fascinating - I thought exactly the same as @rawkode.dev - why the lateral movement... I still can't see why that's the case though. Does this mena it leaves the Linux Foundation? github.com/cncf/sandbox...

I started using @meetgranola.bsky.social yesterday and I am incredibly impressed! I've tried a few of these tools before and none have given me these results. So easy to get started as well! Nice work

A person at the aspire lounge in Belfast City airport was able to keep a straight face when they told me it was £51 as a walk in cost - I have no idea how they didn’t realise that was ridiculous and laughed as I laughed :)

Another day in the .NET ecosystem and it’s OSS (un)sustainability www.jimmybogard.com/automapper-a...

So we built a fuse style Filesystem for being able to interact with @systeminit.com - we didn't add macFUSE support yet and I was impatient... so I ran the binary in a container and needed to turn on rsync because:

Another day and another Devoxx / Voxxed rejection to a CFP - I just can’t get into that conference loop at all

If you are in London on April 9th, sign up for @awsuguk.bsky.social and go hear @stack72.dev talk about how we use the @awscloud.bsky.social Cloud Control API to automate the surface area of our AWS assets! www.meetup.com/awsuguk/even...

AWS User Group UK Meetup #70, Wed, Apr 9, 2025, 6:00 PM | Meetup

We're thrilled to welcome [Ayhan Setirekli](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayhansetirekli/), Lead Cloud/DevOps Engineer at Cognizant, who will share insights on **S3 Security*

meetup.com

So I wrote a new talk specifically about AWS and I like the feel of it: Automating AWS Integration with Amazon Cloud Control API at System Initiative Looking forward to giving it at AWS User Group UK on April 9th - www.meetup.com/awsuguk/even...

AWS User Group UK Meetup #70, Wed, Apr 9, 2025, 6:00 PM | Meetup

Welcome to our April meetup! We are delighted to welcome [Ayhan Setirekli](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayhansetirekli/), Lead Cloud/DevOps Engineer at Cognizant. He will b

meetup.com

Taking the new @buildkite.bsky.social build page for a test drive! It feels way eaiser to find information :)

We've started doing training sessions for System Initiative. From a standing start to a full application running on AWS, with ECS, best practice networking, load balancing, manual failover to an EC2 instance, and a tutorial on how to build your own custom templates from scratch: less than 4 hours.

So Trump signing executive orders right now is like that character in Harry Potter who signs decrees… does that make Elon the person who nails the orders to the wall?

@simonmcc.bsky.social @grahamhayes.bsky.social where are you gents?

Are you coming to @cfgmgmtcamp.bsky.social ? I am. My talk Monday afternoon is going to be the deepest, most technical talk I’ve given in years. Come learn a new theory of automation with me. It’ll be dope, I promise. Then on Wednesday, come to our workshop and learn System Initiative!

So i've been testing a new editor integration for @systeminit.com and I had to use @vscode.dev to do it because their remote development experience is so good! The lack of reactivity from @zed.dev was a bit painful with no way to manually force a refresh...

We are so excited for the latest Opportunity we started - Editor Integration!! We are building a FUSE based file system to allow our users to mount their workspace for authoring assets from their local IDE!! Read more about it on our blog - www.systeminit.com/blog/opportu...

Just submitted an application for the AWS Community Builders program. I deal with aws assets and integrations every day so I thought I’d give this a go :) Let’s see how it turns out