Comment by solatic

So if you want to target an infra engineer at a growth company, usually in growth companies where there is only one, maybe two infra/non-product engineers, I would recommend that you start from the following axioms:

  1. Infra engineers always want to apply changes by themselves, but tooling can always recommend changes
  2. What are all the kinds of work that infra engineers would love to do, that *do* add value, but that they haven't built yet because they can't prioritize it?
  3. How do you build an agent that:
    a. Understands architectural context
    b. Offers to set up (i.e. Terraform PR) value-adding infra
    c. That the human infra engineer can easily maintain
    d. That the human infra engineer will appreciate as being value-adding and not time-wasting or unnecessary-expense?

Maybe the key isn't to provide an agent that will power a PaaS; maybe the key is to give early infra engineers the productivity to build their own in-house PaaS. Then your value-add above Claude Code is clear, because Claude Code is a generic enough tool that it doesn't even make any recommendations; because a DevOps agent works within an axiomatic framework of improving visibility, reducing costs, improving release velocity, improving security, etc., so it can even start (after understanding the architecture, i.e. by hooking up MCP servers and writing an INFRA.md) by making recommendations and then just ask the customer if they like the PRs it is proposing. Does that resonate with you?