[nickpapciak]

That’s actually a really interesting point. We started out building out basically an “agentic PaaS” exactly as you described, but quickly found difficulty in securing more customers and moving up-market (from seed stage to series A+) for it. Because a PaaS did not have sufficient abstractions + the customers were too afraid to give us control, because even if it was their cloud, if we went under there was a sense that they “lost” their deployment platform. (This was the sentiment we were able to piece together from talking to many people).

Right now most of our value, as you said, is in augmenting an infra engineer at a growth stage company to limit some of the operational burdens they deal with. For the companies we’ve been selling to, the customers are SWEs who have been forced to learn infra when needs arise. But overall they are fairly competent and technical. And Claude code or other agentic coding tools are not always sufficient or safe to use. Our customers have told us anecdotally that Claude code gets stuck in a hallucination loop of nothingness on certain tasks and that Datafruit was able to solve them.

That being said, we have lost sales because people are content with Claude code. So this is something we are thinking about.

[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?

[nickpapciak]

Yes, some of this definitely resonates. We really want the agents to suggest their own, novel projects, beyond security or cost optimization. I think this is more feasible for coding agents to do in infra rather than dev work because a lot of the dev work depends strictly on what the customers want, whereas infra work can be more internal and developer focused so there’s opportunities to suggest improvements to the internal system.

I think in the near-term, however, the problem we have identified is that while developers at growth stage have been vastly accelerated, the infra engineers have not been. So our tool is almost helping them “catch up” to the new rapid pace of development. This is dangerous due to the complexity and need for infrastructure to be robust, hence why we are really focused on making it safe to use.

At larger enterprisey companies, AI has not yet been an extreme productivity boost for the developers like it has been for growth stage companies. But I do believe that an enterprise adoption wave is coming.