You Were Never Declaring State. You Were Observing by Hand
The article discusses the evolution of infrastructure management tools from manual state declarations to automated observations. It highlights how modern agents can now observe and capture the state of systems directly, eliminating the need for pre-computed declarations. The role of architects has shifted from crafting declarations to determining the boundaries of observation and action.
- ▪Traditional infrastructure management involved writing down observations for tools that could not see the system themselves.
- ▪Modern agents can now observe live systems and capture their state as versioned data without human intervention.
- ▪The architect's role has evolved to focus on defining the boundaries of observation and action rather than just crafting declarations.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
You Were Never Declaring State. You Were Observing By Hand.What changes when your agent can observe reality instead of reading your notes about itMay 22, 2026 · 6 min · Sean EscrivaEvery Terraform file you ever wrote was a note to a blind tool. You looked at your infrastructure, decided what it should be, wrote that decision into HCL, and handed it to a program that could not see for itself. The declaration was your observation, pre-computed and frozen into a file.The same was true for Chef recipes, Puppet manifests, and CFEngine promises. You observed the system. You wrote down what you saw and what you wanted.
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