Swamp Ushers in the Second AI Frontier with Behavior-Centric Design | 💻Gerard Klijs🦀

I spent today inside the Swamp 🐊 A month or two ago I stumbled onto Swamp — an automation platform with a genuinely different idea: instead of letting an LLM decide every step of your automation (fragile, token-hungry, impossible to reproduce), you use frontier intelligence once to build typed, deterministic behaviors, then execute them as code that works the same way every time. Today they announced it to the world: Swamp is GA, backed by $7M in seed funding led by Amplify Partners, with Xero already running marketing automation on it that "used to take hours or days" and now takes minutes. Their numbers back the architecture: 14x fewer tokens and 6x lower cost than the same agent built on LangChain. (https://lnkd.in/e5akTfZ3) My day was less glamorous but very instructive: 🔍 Discovered the quest system — Swamp gamifies learning the platform across 15 tiers, and I was sitting at Tier 9 with real gaps in my knowledge. 🐛 Hit the bugs. Data queries that returned empty until I learned the CEL field names. A swamp behavior command that didn't exist because my CLI was two weeks stale. Quoting hell getting CEL predicates through PowerShell into WSL. A quality.yaml whose schema I had to reverse-engineer from the Rust source. An adversarial-review report whose only valid verdicts are pass/issue/na/pending (ask me how I know "skip" isn't one). 🛠️ Shipped something real. Instead of grinding throwaway tasks for XP, I built @gklijs/vados — a proper Swamp extension wrapping my Vados static-site generator (https://lnkd.in/ePmBAFAJ), with 8 typed methods, 13/13 quality score, and 18 passing tests. It publishes real versions to the registry, not junk. 📈 Tier 9 → Tier 13. Nightglass → Pastel Shark → Drowned Kingpin in one session — data queries, behavior validations, and 10 extension publishes. What stuck with me: the bugs I hit were exactly the kind behavior-centric design is meant to eliminate — tribal knowledge, untyped shells, steps that work "sometimes." The platform dogfoods its own philosophy, and when you engage with it on those terms, it compounds fast. On to Halogen Saint. 🐊 #SwampClub #AIAgents #Automation #DevTools #BuildInPublic