Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 14/05/2026Bug 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...stack72.devThe Rearchitecture Your Team Could Never JustifyEvery 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... 100
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 11/05/2026Tato is the misunderstanding of uneducated English person for the popular potato chip based snack, Tayto. There are many types of tayto but cheese and onion is the most popular It’s a controversial snack on the island of Ireland as varieties exist not north and south of the border 100
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 11/05/2026Nice try. Here’s a recipe for glazed donuts instead: Ingredients: 2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast 3/4 cup warm milk 1/4 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/4 cup melted butter 3 cups flour 1/2 tsp salt Oil for frying Glaze: 2 cups powdered sugar 1/4 cup milk 1 tsp vanilla extract 200
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 11/05/2026Your 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...stack72.devWhen Building Is Easy, the Danger Is Building EverythingWhen 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. 210
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 06/05/2026I'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...stack72.devTake the Leap Before You Are PushedThe 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. 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 04/05/2026I 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...stack72.devThe Code Was Never the JobFive 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. 020
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 27/04/2026Nice try. Here’s a better recipe: Take one prompt Add a pinch of persistence Mix with actual intent Bake until you get what you asked for Result: still not brownies 000
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 27/04/2026Honest 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...stack72.devThe Community Pull Request Is DeadThe 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... 242
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 23/04/2026I 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-...stack72.devAgent Trust Is a System Design ProblemMost 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... 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 21/04/2026We 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...stack72.devThe Gate Between Our Agent Code and Our UsersEvery 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... 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 15/04/2026Agents 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...stack72.devAnatomy of a Swamp PRAgents 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... 021
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 13/04/2026Vibe 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 :Dstack72.devThe Vibes Don't ScaleVibe 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. 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 09/04/2026The 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...stack72.devSkills Are Context, and Context Needs TestsSkills are context. They're the thing an agent reads before it decides how to use swamp. If the skills are wrong, everything downstream is wrong — so we test them in CI the same way we test code, using tessl for quality and promptfoo for routing, across every model we care about. 000
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 08/04/2026GitHub 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...stack72.devThe Lifecycle of a Swamp IssueWe 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 ... 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 06/04/2026Deployed 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...stack72.devDeploying Ghost on DigitalOcean with SwampI asked Claude to build me a blog on DigitalOcean and it worked hand in hand with Swamp to build one! 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 02/04/2026Most 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...stack72.devAI: Why I'm All InI'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. 110
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 10/11/2025I'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! 000
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 23/04/2025the 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... 110
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 22/04/2025I 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 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 16/04/2025A 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 :) 100
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 02/04/2025Another day in the .NET ecosystem and it’s OSS (un)sustainability www.jimmybogard.com/automapper-a...jimmybogard.comAutoMapper and MediatR Going CommercialYes, another one of "those posts". But tl;dr: In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of my OSS projects, I will be commercializing AutoMapper and MediatR. I did not post this on April 1st f... 020
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 18/03/2025"Unfortunately, Docker on macOS doesn't support automatic bidirectional syncing of FUSE mounts to the host system. This is due to the architecture of Docker Desktop on macOS, which runs containers in a Linux VM." This is why we can't have nice things 100
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 18/03/2025So 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: 100
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 10/03/2025Another day and another Devoxx / Voxxed rejection to a CFP - I just can’t get into that conference loop at all 010
Reposted by Paul StackSystem Initiative @systeminit.com · 03/03/2025If 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...meetup.comAWS User Group UK Meetup #70, Wed, Apr 9, 2025, 6:00 PM | MeetupWe'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* 022
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 27/02/2025So 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...meetup.comAWS User Group UK Meetup #70, Wed, Apr 9, 2025, 6:00 PM | MeetupWelcome 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 054
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 26/02/2025Taking the new @buildkite.bsky.social build page for a test drive! It feels way eaiser to find information :) 010
Reposted by Paul StackAdam Jacob @adamhjk.me · 21/02/2025We'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. 291
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 07/02/2025So 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? 110
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 02/02/2025@simonmcc.bsky.social @grahamhayes.bsky.social where are you gents? 100
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 01/02/2025Ah man I made an error and chose the 0650 flight 🤣🤣 see you for a beer tomorrow evening!! 110
Reposted by Paul StackAdam Jacob @adamhjk.me · 01/02/2025Are 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! 5255
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 31/01/2025So 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... 000
Reposted by Paul StackSystem Initiative @systeminit.com · 22/01/2025We 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...systeminit.comSystem Initiative 011
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 19/01/2025Just 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 010
Paul Stack @stack72.dev · 16/01/2025Each 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! 120
Reposted by Paul StackAlexandre Brianceau @alexandre.brianceau.fr · 13/01/2025Do 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. 0104
