We're building a language. Here's why.

The 20 SaaS Gauntlet didn't go how we planned. But here's the thing, it didn't need to.

We had a mountain of opinions about how Swirls should work. The developer experience, the graph structure, the way everything connects. Confident opinions, too. The kind you get when you've been deep in something for months and you stop asking whether it actually works and start assuming it does.

Building Form Flip forced us to actually use our own stuff. As a consumer. And that changed everything.

The problem we didn't see coming

We didn't want to build apps. That was never the point.

We wanted LLMs to build them. We wanted Swirls to become something an AI could pick up and run with. Define a workflow, wire up the logic, ship something useful. That was the vision.

Here's where it fell apart: Swirls was new enough that LLMs had no real frame of reference for it. They'd try to orchestrate workflows and just got it wrong. Wrong structure, wrong connections, wrong assumptions baked in. The AI couldn't reliably implement Swirls definitions because there was nothing for it to anchor to.

We needed a language.

Enter the Swirls DSL

Yes, you read that right. We're building our own language.

A single .swirls file can now define an entire workflow: graph structure, triggers, agentic AI steps, human-in-the-loop checkpoints. The whole thing. It's declarative, it's readable, and critically, LLMs can actually write it.

Because once you have a language with clear grammar and semantics, you can teach it. You can build Swirls skills that LLMs can load up and use to generate valid definitions without guessing. The orchestration problem disappears. The LLM has something to anchor to.

It's opened the floodgates.

What this does to the developer experience

Our CLI changed dramatically as a result.

You can now run a .swirls file locally. No account. No subscription. No cloud. Just the CLI and your workflow definition, executing on your machine.

That matters a lot to us. We want developers to actually want to use Swirls, not feel like they're locked into a platform before they've even decided if it's worth their time. Local-first removes that friction entirely. Try it, break it, iterate on it. No commitment required.

And when you're ready? swirls deploy. Fully managed on Swirls Cloud. That's it.

The vision here is pretty compelling: Swirls becomes a language-agnostic, agentic AI, workflow automation runtime that can live inside your app or stand on its own. Got a bunch of internal glue logic you need to wrangle? Drop it in a Swirls monorepo. Want to drive application logic with AI-powered workflows? Same deal. The runtime doesn't care where it lives.

On the gauntlet

We're pausing the 20 SaaS challenge. Not killing it, just pausing it.

Form Flip did its job. It surfaced a real problem with how LLMs interact with Swirls, which led directly to the DSL. That's a pretty good return on a few weekends of work.

The website's been updated. The messaging is tighter. And now we're heads-down on two things: the DSL and CLI experience, and making the production runtime reliable enough that you'd stake your business on it. Secure, highly available, no surprises.

More updates soon. We're just getting started.