Swamp Club
Build AI systems from repeatable behaviors, rather than token-hungry agent-centric designs. Swamp is a CLI that teaches your AI agent to break a problem down into reusable behaviors and connect them into workflows you can review, share and run again. By default the data lives in
.swamp/(the swamp).
(from git README)
Why it’s better:
- Use your favorite harness — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, Kiro and more.
- Connect to any API — start from thousands of existing extensions or write your own.
- Store and query your data — versioned, with a lifetime you control.
- Keep secrets safe — credentials come from vaults, are injected only when needed and are redacted from the output.
- See exactly what happened every time — every run is recorded.
Founder Adam Jacob has spoken a lot about open source and open source business models.
Open Source
Swamp is licensed AGPL, with an extension.
They have an OSS FAQ that goes into more detail.
Swamp itself is a commercial product produced from the open source software, exclusively by Elder Swamp Club, Inc. It is distributed under our software license agreement.
Others are allowed to make their own distribution of the software, but they cannot use the Elder Swamp Club trademarks, cloud services, etc.
If you are familiar with how Red Hat or Visual Studio Code works, Swamp is very similar.
And then goes on to a long list of things that other distributors must do, including renaming the command line tool:
For example, the ‘swamp’ command line tool must be renamed (it is customer facing), while functions using ‘swamp’ in the source code do not (they are not customer facing).
Can you explain how this all works in more detail?
Elder Swamp Club, Inc. is a venture-backed startup.
Swamp is the product exclusively produced and distributed by Elder Swamp Club, Inc.
Swamp software is the open source software we leverage to create our product.
To understand this more fully, we need to talk about three important concepts: copyright, trademark, and patents. What follows is a (relatively) plain language summary, intended to give you a basic conceptual overview. To learn more, we recommend reading “Intellectual Property and Open Source” by Van Lindberg.
Elder Swamp Club, Inc. owns the copyright to Swamp (the software), as we paid all the developers who created it. Per our contribution policy, we will remain the sole copyright holder for Swamp, as we will not allow code to be merged that does not originate from developers employed by Elder Swamp Club, Inc.
Updates
Announced their seed round October 2026
We've raised $7m from Amplify Partners, Encoded Ventures, Jesse Robbins, and Scott Tolinski. Swamp is a platform for building AI systems from repeatable behaviors, rather than from token-hungry agent-centric designs.
swamp-club.com/press/swamp-…
— Adam Jacob (@adamhjk.me) October 14, 2026 at 11:17 AM
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