[holoway]

Ryan can give you more details about his own experience. (I'm the CEO of System Initiative) But a lot of it comes from switching to a model where you work with an AI agent alongside digital twins of the infrastructure.

In particular, debugging speed improves because you can ask the agent questions like:

`I have a website running on ec2 that is not working. Make a plan to discover all the infrastructure components that could have an impact on why I can't reach it from a web browser, then troubleshoot the issue.`

And it will discover infrastructure, evaluate the configuration, and see if it can find the issue. Then it can make the fix in a simulation, humans can review it, and you're done. It handles all the audit trails, review, state, etc for you under the hood - so the actual closing of the troubleshooting loop happens much faster as well.

[AOE9]

When you say 'digital twins of the infrastructure' you mean another deployed instance? So if they'd just made a preview environment created upon a pull request they'd have just got the same speed up.

> It handles all the audit trails, review, state, etc for you under the hood.

So there is no more IaC SI now manages everything?

[holoway]

Nope - I mean we make a 1:1 model of the real resource, and then let you propose changes to that data model. Rather than thinking of it like code in a file, think of it like having a live database that does bi-directional sync. The speedup in validating the change happens because we can run it on the data model, rather than on 'real' infrastructure.

Then we track the changes you make to that hypothetical model, and when you like it, apply the specific actions needed to make the real infrastructure conform. All the policy checking, pipeline processing, state file management, etc. is all streamlined.

[holoway]

And yes, there is no more IaC under the hood.

However! Folks with big IaC deployments can still use all the discovery and troubleshooting goodness, and then make the change however they want. System Initiative is fine either way.

[esseph]

No, not another deployed instance.