The DOOTery and Swamp: who carries the process

Everything after the request answers to it. Before anyone starts, a reviewer cuts duplicates and work that serves nothing the requester wants. Where the change needs them, design settles what people see and do, and system design settles the parts underneath and how they connect. Then two planners write the plan apart and settle one.

The person describes the task in their own words, and Swamp saves it as a brief that the agent reads first. The agent then finds the behaviors it needs, Swamp's units of work, creates their definitions, and wires them together.

A senior programmer cuts the build into narrow jobs, and several programmers build them at once. Design and system design give every builder the same standards, so pieces built at the same time fit when they meet. The senior reviews each piece as it lands and merges only accepted pieces.

The agent the team picked does the building. A behavior has two halves, a type, which is reusable logic written in TypeScript, and a definition, which is YAML configuration for one use of the type. A workflow joins behaviors into steps that run in dependency order. To reach a service, Swamp first searches thousands of existing extensions, add-ons that teams publish and share.

The agents that check the work did not build it, and they do not edit it. They choose their own checks from what the plan says done means, and they use the result the way a person would. They are agents, not a human audit. Every release is tested as the exact code that ships.

A workflow's author adds assert steps, steps that test what earlier steps produced, and gives each a severity. A low-severity assertion can flag a drift without failing the pipeline, while a high-severity one blocks a deploy. Checks also run before a behavior's method, so a check that fails leaves nothing to clean up. The software factory page calls its gates "hard enforcement".

A problem that stops what was asked goes back to the builder who owns the code, and the checkers check the repair. When the process itself fails, the team fixes the process, for every project that follows.

A step can be set to run only when another step failed, to send an alert, and a cleanup step can run whether or not the workflow succeeded. When a check misses a class of error, Adam Jacob says to ask "how do I change this factory so that this whole class of error gets caught more often?"

Delivery is part of the work. The DOOTery ships the change, deploys it, and cleans up through each project's own route, and each change comes with pictures of what changed. The person who asked sees the result and answers one decision at a time.

A workflow can run a staging step, hold at a manual approval step, and then run the production step. Swamp's guide describes holding a workflow at "a human sign-off before it touches production", with the approver reviewing the pending gate out of band and then approving or rejecting and resuming.