Paul Stack

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

Each time I log into the @scaleway.bsky.social console, I am always pleasantly surprised at how much they are building! Can' wait to start talking about offering @systeminit.com integration for it!

Do you come to the Configuration Management Camp in few weeks? You can get your branded gears right now: shop.cfgmgmtcamp.org Shop is open until Wednesday, you pay now and get your stuff at the event.

Another day, another blog post about a new opportunity we started just before the holiday break! This time, the ability to trigger System Initiative using a GitHub Action (or a CURL request!). Come build out your CD pipelines!! www.systeminit.com/blog/opportu...

Schedule for @cfgmgmtcamp.bsky.social is out: cfgmgmtcamp.org/ghent2025/sc... 🎉 Thanks @krisbuytaert.bsky.social & Toshaan! Amazing line-up and looking forward meeting friends again in Ghent! I'll also be talking about scaling & compliance with Karpenter this year! Who's coming? 🍻 🧇 #cfgmgmtcamp

We started work before the holiday period on a new set of fine-grained access controls to better server enterprise teams! You can read more about it on our new blog post that introduces the opportunity - www.systeminit.com/blog/opportu...

Happy new year to you all! We are starting the year building on the features we released in December! We are working on "Visual Templates" - a way to create templates from a diagram! Come read about it in the blog post www.systeminit.com/blog/opportu...

So this year @cfgmgmtcamp.bsky.social have a shop where you can buy items and pick them up at the conference!! Check it out - shop.cfgmgmtcamp.org Looking forward to picking up my hoodie!

We've been experimenting in the Gen AI space recently and the feature is starting to take shape :) More on this soon! Check out the video below! You can take a well documented AWS endpoint and automatically generate a System Initiative schema for it! Lots more to do here but it's trending well...

Our last awesome announcement of the week... today we are delighted to announce the launch of 'Views'! Views allow a user to create a semantically relevant collection of components. You can use views to create views for networking, dns specific views etc.! www.systeminit.com/blog/announc...

The lack of being able to post any videos more than 60 seconds on this app frustrates me deeply!!

So @anthonychu.ca gave a great show of Azure Container apps and the things you can do with them - I need to have a look at how they can model them in @systeminit.com

This is one of the coolest releases we've made yet! And this is just the first turn of that work :) the next set of updates to it were just planned today and it's going to be another level!

Feels weird that we are in the week following #reinvent and the @awscloud.bsky.social CLI docs are not yet updated with things like EKS AutoMode...

@adamhjk.me so @brig.gs is in Vegas this week - you all should have a beer :)

We got 3 major features hitting this week and we are so excited to get them out into the world... :D Can't wait for you all to be able to use them!!

Rachel kills it as always. This is why we need a new automation primitive. The constraints are systemic in the construction of our delivery mechanisms - and we’ve pushed them roughly as far as they can go. I think @systeminit.com’s hypergraph of functions is an answer. (1/n)

Friends, it's #reinvent2024 week! We thought it would be a good time to launch our how-to guide for deploying a Lambda Container App with @systeminit.com ! docs.systeminit.com/how-tos/aws-...