I’ve been in love with Terraform since the day I first saw it. We built Spacelift around making it massively multiplayer – turning solo infrastructure work into a team sport. And judging by our customers and investors, we got something right.
But here’s what’s been bugging me lately: While AI is revolutionizing everything around us, the best we’ve managed in infrastructure is… using ChatGPT to generate HCL? Really? That’s our innovation?
Don’t get me wrong – stability matters. We all need our skills to stay relevant. But watching developers ship features at light speed while we’re still writing YAML and HCL felt like being stuck in time.
So we built something different.
Today we’re launching Intent – infrastructure management that speaks human.
No more translating “I need a database” into 50 lines of HCL. Just say what you need. Intent talks directly to OpenTofu providers and makes it happen.
Here’s the twist: there’s no generated HCL code. Intent takes your plain English (or any other natural language) request and calls providers directly using their API. You get real infrastructure, real state, real management – without writing or reviewing a single line of HCL.
You still get the safety nets – plan/apply, policies, audit trails, and the ability to export to Terraform*. But you skip the ceremony when the ceremony doesn’t add value.
When we started designing Intent, we made some deliberate choices that shaped everything:
Meet developers where they already are. We didn’t build another UI or force you into our chat interface. Intent works through MCP (Model Context Protocol) – meaning it plugs directly into whatever AI tools you’re already using. Claude, Cursor, your custom agent – Intent becomes their infrastructure capability, not another tool to context-switch into.
Build on open foundations. We didn’t create proprietary provider APIs or lock you into our ecosystem. Intent uses the exact same OpenTofu providers from the public registry that you use today. Every provider, every resource type, every parameter – if it works in OpenTofu, it works in Intent. The open source ecosystem remains the bedrock.
Make it infrastructure-native, not AI-native. The MCP server runs remotely in Spacelift, not on your laptop. This means Intent has access to your existing contexts, policies, state, and workers. It’s not a disconnected AI toy – it’s a fully integrated part of your infrastructure platform with all the governance and security you expect.
Keep the escape hatch open. Every piece of infrastructure created through Intent can be exported as standard Terraform/OpenTofu code. Start with intent, graduate to code when complexity demands it. No lock-in, no dead ends.
We built Intent for those moments when full IaC feels like overkill:
Quick prototyping: “Spin up a dev environment for the new feature”
Incident response: “I need a read replica NOW”
Unmanaged drift: “Import those 47 resources someone created in the console”
This isn’t about replacing Terraform. Your production pipelines remain unchanged, Terraform is the most appropriate tool there. This is about having another tool in your toolbox – one that matches the speed of modern development.
Infrastructure-as-code taught us that infrastructure should be declarative, versionable, and repeatable. But somewhere along the way, we confused the principles with the implementation. We made “code” and “GitOps” mandatory when sometimes “intent” and “history” would do.
Intent preserves what matters – declarative infrastructure, state management, governance – while removing what doesn’t, when it doesn’t: the translation layer between human thought and cloud resources.
This isn’t just about making infrastructure easier. It’s about acknowledging that the boundary between human and AI work is shifting. By building Intent as an open protocol (MCP) that works with open providers (OpenTofu), we’re not trying to own this transition – we’re trying to enable it.
We believe the future has multiple tools for different jobs: Terraform for production pipelines where precision and review matter most. Intent for everything else where speed and simplicity win. Both running on the same platform, governed by the same policies, managed by the same team.
Intent is live in early access. We’re not sure where this goes, but we know the status quo isn’t enough anymore.
Help us figure out what infrastructure management looks like when AI can actually understand what you want – not just help you write what you already knew you needed to write.
Because if we’re honest, most infrastructure requests are simple. It’s the ceremony we’ve built around them that’s complex.
If you’d like to learn more about Spacelift Intent, join our Webinar here.
Solve your infrastructure challenges
Spacelift is a flexible orchestration solution for IaC development. It delivers enhanced collaboration, automation, and controls to simplify and accelerate the provisioning of cloud-based infrastructures.
