Swamp launches officially today. The team asked whether I’d write something for the launch, and I said yes on the condition that it be what I actually think. I’m a user, a community contributor, and a paying customer. Best effort I was trying to get an agent to work with the infrastructure tools I already had. CloudFormation ran some stacks and Terraform ran others. I wanted an agent in the middle to plan changes, apply them, and tell me what happened. ...
Mark Burgess shipped CFEngine in 1993, formalized promise theory with Siri Fagernes around 2005, and published In Search of Certainty in 2015. The model is precise: autonomous agents observe their environment, reason locally about what they find, and make promises about their own behavior. The agent does not receive instructions from a controller. The agent looks around, decides what to do, and commits to doing it. Every infrastructure tool since has claimed some lineage from this idea. Chef called its resources “convergent.” Puppet called its catalogs “desired state.” Terraform called its plans “declarative.” Ansible called its playbooks “idempotent.” ...