I was a Terraform believer.

I had written hundreds of .tf files. I had debugged state corruption at 2 AM. I had carefully designed remote backends in S3 with DynamoDB locking so my team wouldn't step on each other. I had given internal talks about Terraform best practices. If you had asked me two years ago whether I'd ever move away from it, I would have laughed.

And then I started using MechCloud — a stateless Infrastructure-as-Code platform that treats live cloud APIs as the source of truth instead of a state file — and I had to rethink a lot of things I took for granted.

This is not a hit piece on Terraform. It is still an exceptional tool with a massive ecosystem.…