The Robot Vacuum Needed a Contract
My Valetudo robot was already speaking MQTT. The useful part was turning that topic tree into a discoverable, validated Swamp model instead of making an agent guess.
Writing
Trust, but assert.
A fleet-wide upgrade chore turned into a published extension, and its first live campaign caught a bug in itself. Field notes on adopting swamp's new assert steps — and on making release adoption deterministic instead of a vibe.
Some bots just want to watch the token burn.
I exhausted a Claude allowance with an unbounded benchmark, then spent a weekend finding out what a supervised software factory could actually deliver. Forty-nine accepted runs later, the evidence points to controlled delivery—not autonomy.