The Emerging IaC/Agentic Ecosystem

Hey folks,

I’m seeing an emerging ecosystem around agentic IaC and talked about it at my IaC Conf 2026 presentation.

In this newsletter, I’ll look at four tools on a spectrum. This spectrum starts with very light agents, then an agentic solution, light AI, and all the way on the other end you have fully agentic systems.

On the left hand side of that spectrum we have enabling agents: StateGraph. We next have improving generation and providing guardrails, that is Infracodebase. We have a completely new IaC tool in the space, which is Swamp. And finally, we have a fully agentic solution, Spacelift Intent.

Here’s a quick introduction to each of these tools.

StateGraph

StateGraph is a graph-native backend for Terraform state. It is built by the folks at Terrateam. They launched last year. They've come out with a version 1.0 this year, and then they immediately came out with a version 2.0 a couple months later. They're moving fast.

They are a Postgres-backed state graph and they do subgraph plans in seconds. This is an innovative thing in the space. They compute the graph outside of Terraform or OpenTofu and they create small micro states that get planned and applied. That is the main thing that StateGraph enables.

The pain point that they're trying to solve is the state hell problem: Terraform having too big of a state file. Having one thousand or one hundred thousand resources in a state file is a bad problem to have. Plans slow down and things to grind to a halt. They are solving that problem.

They are not an AI tool actually, but they are agentic first. They're enabling agents by allowing easy state querying and faster operations within state.

Infracodebase

Next up, we have Infracodebase. I see it as governed IaC generation. The pitch is: natural language plus your cloud environment plus your organizational patterns equals good production infrastructure as code. The output is compatible with all of the major infrastructure as code tools.

The real selling point is they have governance baked in: the rule sets, the naming and security and compliance capabilities that they provide as guardrails for your IaC generation. They are trying to solve the problem of best practices being hard to implement.

I think of Infracodebase as an IaC agent harness as a SaaS tool. They are enabling you to build IaC quickly with configurable guardrails.

Swamp

Swamp is a very new tool. It's an agent-native CLI and automation framework for cloud operations. They are coming out of the folks from System Initiative. Adam Jacob, if you know him from Chef, built this tool. He built System Initiative, and this is five of the core team members from that team that went on to build Swamp. I believe they did it in about a month or two.

Their premise is essentially: maybe the problem isn't AI operating on IaC, maybe it is IaC. They are saying, “hey, the substrate, the underlying language, and the way it's approached; these are the problem.” So they built something completely new where they have typed models, explicit workflows, and git-reviewable state, all with a very local-first approach.

They're flipping the table and revisiting all the pain points of current solutions with a new approach.

Swamp is a completely new IaC tool and is intended to be agent-driven.

Spacelift Intent

Next up is Spacelift Intent. Intent is a natural language interface for cloud provisioning and management. And it's not actually an IaC tool, it's an MCP server for infrastructure provisioning.

With Intent, they're translating your natural language into Terraform provider API calls, and then storing that in a database, and then gating it with OPA.

Their pitch is not actually to replace IaC, but to offer a fully agentic interface for it. They are saying Intent is an on-ramp to infrastructure as code. Their idea is: you use Intent for your proof of concept environments, your sandbox environments, or your dev environments to build something new. Then you graduate that new change that you just built into infrastructure as code for production.

This allows provisioning infrastructure at the speed of AI. This is similar to the way that we can ask Claude Code to use the AWS CLI to go and create us a new VPC, and it can do it in 30 seconds. Intent offers a comparable experience, but with governance baked in. You're able to provision at the speed of AI but still have guardrails for your organization.

Unlike Swamp, Intent isn't trying to replace IaC. It's aiming to make getting to production quality IaC faster.

That's the spectrum: from StateGraph quietly making Terraform state agent-friendly, through Infracodebase baking in guardrails for AI-driven provisioning, all the way to the agent focused approaches of Swamp and Spacelift Intent. Worth watching which philosophy wins out as more teams put agents in the driver's seat for infrastructure.

May your agents always know the difference between a guardrail and a wall,

Matt @ Masterpoint

PS If you want to chat about how we help build safe, worry-free IaC systems, grab some time on my calendar here. Interested in being on a devops-focused podcast? I’ve been on a few. Reply to me with the topic you want to discuss and I’m happy to intro you to the right podcast.