Slow death of IaC

The read

Nobody switches IaC off. Its layers lose value one at a time, and the installed base keeps it running for years. Adam Jacob says he is never using traditional IaC again, and Darren Shepherd says agents will maintain Terraform and CDK just fine. They argue about different layers of this map.

Sean goes further:

IaC isn’t dying it’s already dead and was always a dead end we just couldn’t see it before. And now attachment to it’s comfortable lie of predictability has people stuck using poor tools to solve modern problems

1. Authoring gets cheap before it gets reliable. Agents write HCL at low cost, and both Adam and Darren accept this. Agents wrote about 23% of public IaC pull requests in May 2026 (Barrak et al.). Single-attempt pass rates on one Terraform benchmark range from 14.0% to 62.4% by model (arXiv 2607.20478). It still removes the main reason to design a tool around a language that humans write.
2. The engine is becoming interchangeable. Terraform and OpenTofu share a language and providers. Pulumi now runs HCL and has a Terraform state backend. Stategraph runs both binaries. When vendors offer the rival interface, the interface is the standard and the engine stops being the differentiator.
3. Day-2 and app + infra work is still custom. This is the gap Adam names. In Firefly’s vendor survey, 90% say their IaC orchestration falls short, and about one third tie drift to a costly production incident.
4. Agent autonomy is limited by guardrails. In the same survey, 34% would trust agents with autonomous production changes, and 42% name missing guardrails as the top blocker. Swamp’s fixed behaviors and vaults answer this blocker. So do the Terraform MCP server and Spacelift’s governed access.
5. Two parts of the state layer are still custom. Run history with typed data records what was done. A resource graph records what exists and what depends on what. The first is in Swamp, the second is in Stategraph. They are complements.
6. Incumbents are also moving up. Pulumi Neo, Terraform Actions, Infragraph and the Terraform Developer Portal all target this space. Swamp’s window is real and contested.