Adam Jacob

Adam Jacob

@adamhjk.me

CEO of System Initiative, Co-Founder of Chef. Open source. Heavy metal and music. Comics. @adamhjk on Twitter, @adamhjk@hachyderm.io on Masotodon.

4.8K followers478 following1.3K posts

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

We've raised $7m from Amplify Partners, Encoded Ventures, Jesse Robbins, and Scott Tolinski. Swamp is a platform for building AI systems from repeatable behaviors, rather than from token-hungry agent-centric designs. swamp-club.com/press/swamp-...

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

Meanwhile over at Swamp Club, the community is timing their activities to maximize points for everyone - you might be building with AI, but you’re probably not having as much fun as we are :)

Adam Jacob reposted

Marko Bevc
@marko.social

Good episode where @emilyomier.bsky.social talked to @adamhjk.me about many things. Also a good reminder that we in #OSS we need to go back to the basic to talk again, share our passions and how we express our ideas through #OpenSource #community ❤️ Whole episode: www.emilyomier.com/podcast/know...

emilyomier.comKnowing your Problem Space is the Moat with Adam Jacob | Emily OmierThis week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Adam Jacob , co-founder and CEO of the Swamp Club.  The first thing we talked about was When To Quit. System Initiative, Adam’s second c...
Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

A lot of the hype-cycle around AI makes it sound like what's happening is we're abandoning everything we've ever learned about, well... everything, and just handed it over to the God machine. Of course that's not true - instead we're figuring out what they mean in context.

Adam Jacob reposted

Autumn Nash 🎃👻💀🖤
@withenoughcoffee.bsky.social

I loved building a Linux distribution as an engineer, contributing to Fedora, and before that as a Security Product Manager. I’m looking for new opportunities that contributing to open-source projects, in roles like Solutions Architect, Forward-Deployed Engineer, Dev Relations Engineer, or Product.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

You don't stop being an engineer when you build software with a factory. You change your perspective from being focused on the implementation details to focusing on the machine that writes it. I break down how to build one in this talk: swamp-club.com/campaign/sof...

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

If you have questions about how to do it, that page also has a link where you can schedule time with me, and we can talk it through together.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

Your software factory will be unique, because your software is unique. It's an expression of your creativity, your intelligence, and your community. We know of at least 9 different examples within the swamp community alone. It's the way. (Want more like this? swamp-club.com/podcast)

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

OpenAI's recent price reductions bring high quality intelligence at a low price point at higher speed. Pick the right model for the right task. Swamp helps you do this by putting a workflow as the spine of the agent, and then choosing when to use which model. More at swamp-club.com/podcast

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

We've not done a code review in months, and the industry move right now is toward plan review. In our experience, that doesn't last long - because what you really want is creative connection, and that's best done face to face, not in a doc. (swamp-club.com/podcast for more moments like this!)

View full thread
Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

* Kimi K3 on Hugging Face & Dario Amodei gets mad about distillation * Tobi Knaup thinks Open Weight models are AI's Kubernetes moment * Keith Townsend explains deterministic AI is an architecture problem, not a model problem * Mitchell Hashimoto starts a new company, Superlogical

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

If you read something interesting this week and want us to talk about it, just tag me in here and I'll add it to the list! See you every monday. :)

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

Every Monday morning me, Nick Stinemates, Paul Stack and a special guest will fill you in on everything that happened last week in AI and Infrastructure Engineering. We read the news so you don't have to. We're joing this week by infrastructure legend Sean Escriva, and we cover:

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

* Dan Lorenc phases out code review at Chainguard * GitHub launches stacked PRs * OpenAI reduces the price of 5.6 Luna and Terra * Paul Stack explains that best practices come and go, but architecture is forever * OpenAI releases Codex Security

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

Happy Sysadmin Day! Once upon a time, our VP of Engineering decided to take our team of 12 out to drinks to celebrate us. Only he decided he was too busy to celebrate us himself, so he sent his right hand man.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

He bought a couple pitchers of beer, we all clustered together, and he decides it's a good idea to toast us. So he says: "To the Systems Administrators - it's too bad you weren't smart enough to be Software Developers!"

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

Proving people like him wrong has led me to a fantastic, wonderful career, filled with the deepest systems thinkers on the planet. Cheers, my friends.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

The most useful and interesting property of software in the Agent era so far is its ability to adapt to your circumstances. Mitchell talked about this in his post about the "building block economy", framed through the lens of what grows fastest.

View full thread
Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

I'm focused on building software that adapts - through agents extending the software directly, and users molding it through their own intent to solve their problems. In a world where we build the machine that builds the machine, it's a critical capability.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

The most useful and interesting property of software in the Agent era so far is its ability to adapt to your circumstances. Mitchell talked about this in his post about the "building block economy", framed through the lens of what grows fastest.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

I think that it's not just the availability of a primitive that matters - it's that the primitives are what allow an Agent to build software that adapts to your circumstances. The SaaS/Cloud age has been the opposite - everyone decided the best thing was to adapt to the platforms

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

GitHub's issue and comment flow makes no sense anymore, if you are building the machine that builds the machine. The perspective we care about now is the agents perspective as part of a deterministic process that builds the software we want.

View full thread
Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

That is what I want now in my development loop. I want visibility into the machine that builds the machine, and I want to offer the same to the people who want changes in swamp! I want the entire lifecycle of a change told this way, from inception to production.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

GitHub's issue and comment flow makes no sense anymore, if you are building the machine that builds the machine. The perspective we care about now is the agents perspective as part of a deterministic process that builds the software we want.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

The development loop for us now with swamp looks like firing up an agent and saying "triage issue 157". The agent reads the issue, confirms it by building a reproduction, comes up with a plan to fix it, runs adversarial review against that plan according to our architecture,

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

code style, quality, etc. Then a human reviews the strategy, the agent implements it, and we run the same adversaries against the outcome to ensure it doesn't drift. Comprehensive testing (including UAT to confirm the product doesn't regress) makes it all work.

Adam Jacob reposted

steve o’grady
@sogrady.org

i've watched @adamhjk.me's journey with AI and thought he'd be a good person to talk to about its impact on builders, and i was not disappointed. this was a very fun and interesting chat. redmonk.com/videos/adam-...

redmonk.com"Absolute AI Maximalist" Adam Jacob on Building Software That Builds SoftwareStephen O’Grady sits down with Adam Jacob, CEO and Co-Founder of System Initiative, for a candid conversation about what it actually feels like to build software in the age of AI agents. Adam describe...

Adam Jacob reposted

ultrathink.art
@ultrathink-art.bsky.social

Replying to @adamhjk.me

This is the right instinct. Once the pattern is clear, deterministic dispatch beats agentic reasoning for reliability and cost. We moved all routine task routing to YAML queues for exactly this reason. github.com/ultrathink-art/agent-orchestra if helpful.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

I've been loving openclaw for building personal automation. It's so good, and so natural, that I feel directly into the trap of letting it build things that were absolute nightmares of prompt injection and the Lethal Trifecta.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

Once I taught the Claw how to use swamp, though - we rebuilt that automation in ways that shifted the majority of its behavior out of the agent, and into a deterministic workflow. LLM usage was constrained to only where the job required it, with no tools enabled.

Adam Jacob
@adamhjk.me

I don't think anyone actually knows what the future of Software Engineering looks like with AI Agents. The frontier is moving so fast, and we are learning so much, that anything you think you know you are likely to learn something different tomorrow.