The New Stack Makers

In this episode ofThe New Stack Agents, Marcin Wyszynski, co-founder of Spacelift and OpenTofu, explains how AI is transforming infrastructure as code (IaC). Originally built for individual operators, tools like Terraform struggled to scale across teams, prompting Wyszynski to help launch OpenTofu after HashiCorp’s 2023 license change. Now, the bigger shift is AI: engineers no longer write configuration languages like HCL manually, as AI tools generate it, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry. However, this creates a dangerous gap between generating infrastructure and truly understanding it—like using a phrasebook to ask questions in a foreign language but not understanding the response. In infrastructure, that lack of comprehension can lead to serious risks. To address this, Spacelift introduced Intent, which allows AI to directly interact with cloud systems in real time while enforcing deterministic guardrails through policy controls. The broader challenge remains balancing speed with control—enabling