Infra tooling expectations in 2026
Infra tooling should ship with CI/CD and a control plane. It should work with the git forge you already have and run on your own infra.
Your IAM can already gate on a tag. So choudoufu writes ownership as tags IAM can read, and chant keeps ownership on the resource too.
Shipping with CI/CD
choudoufu ships five Ops over one live root. GitHub, Forgejo and GitLab pipelines are generated from them and checked in.
Three are read-only. The two that write sit on a push trigger and stop at a gate first. The Op names are the job names, so branch protection can require them.
None of it is hosted by me. The gates are facts in git, so an outage cannot lose them.
A local smoke proves all five, gate included. End-to-end runs exist for GitLab only.
The same goes for the CI around your existing roots and stacks. terragucci runs Terraform and OpenTofu pipelines in your own forge, and plywood does the same for Pulumi and plunge stacks. Both run on chant’s runtime.
A control plane
You should get to look at the estate. The question is where it runs.
behold reads the whole estate as one graph colored by drift. npx @intentius/behold demo puts it on localhost:4600 with no cloud account. Against a real estate it wants read credentials and nothing else. Every write leaves through a gated chant Op.
Meeting that bar costs nothing. All of it is open source and runs on a laptop. With no tenancy and no seat, nobody has a lever to pull later.
Introducing choudoufu and chant
choudoufu is an OpenTofu fork, AWS only. Each resource carries its identity as two tags, so the state file becomes a cache you are allowed to lose.
chant is a TypeScript infra toolchain that splits synthesis from execution and keeps ownership on the resource.
Cost is worth pressing on, though not as a feature anyone should ship. Most orgs solved this years ago with allocation tags. What breaks it is unreliable tags.
The question to ask
Ask where ownership is written, and whether IAM can read it there.