You Don't Need A Fancy IDP To Build Self-service In 2026

Hey folks,

A lot of folks think "self-service" in platform engineering means:

• stand up Backstage (or roll your own)

• build a form

• wire it up to a pipeline

• write the automation

• maintain the automation

• watch the automation drift from your real patterns

And repeat this process, forever.

That can work, sure. It's also a bunch of engineering investment for what is, fundamentally, a templating problem.

Here's what I believe works great at much lower investment:

1. Bake your good practices into your repo's context using things like agents.md, rule files, well-documented modules, and conventions written down somewhere an agent will pick them up.

2. Lean on GitOps, where the merge is the deploy and the PR review is your gate. The main branch is the source of truth and when a change lands in main, infra should be reconciled and be made to be the actual state. You already trust this process to ship software. Don't reinvent the damn wheel.

3. Write an agent skill, a focused prompt that knows your patterns, knows how to scaffold a new service/bucket/queue/whatever, and knows how to open a PR for review.

That's it. No form. No portal. No bespoke automation pipeline.

The developer asks the agent for what they need, the agent generates the IaC using your patterns, the agent opens the PR, a human reviews and merges. GitOps does the rest and the infra ships.

Is it the answer for every org?

No. If you have crazy repo sprawl, no GitOps automation, or 500 developers ramping at once, you might still want a portal.

But for most orgs I see? An agent skill on top of a well-curated IaC repo is 90% of the value of an IDP at 10% of the build cost.

This path is a great way to start today instead of waiting 6 months.

May your repo conventions always be consistent,

Matt @ Masterpoint

PS If you want to chat about agent skills or other ways to improve your IaC architecture, grab some time on my calendar here. If you’ve found this newsletter helpful, please forward it to a friend. Or if you want to share on your company slack, here’s the archive of all my newsletters.