Agents, Engineers, and Citizen Developers

Cory O'Daniel is CEO and co-founder of Massdriver, an internal developer platform and platform orchestrator for governed self-service infrastructure using Terraform, OpenTofu, and Helm. He has spent more than 20 years building teams and startups and working with cloud infrastructure. He created Bonny, an Elixir-based Kubernetes operator framework, and is a co-founder of OpenTofu. Massdriver gives developers self-service cloud infrastructure through diagrams backed by modules approved by their operations teams. Agents pushed the company to redesign its API around context. Because the platform models the connection between an application and a database, it can answer what depends on what. An agent does not have to reconstruct those relationships from cloud API responses. Cory starts safe infrastructure changes with the agent's identity. Giving Claude a person's credentials hides which actor made a change and gives the agent more access than it needs. He argues for attribute-based permissions that encode business rules. An agent might be allowed to provision databases in staging but blocked from resources that store personally identifiable information. Agents can help draft those classifications. The people who know the business still need to review them. They then discuss Massdriver's four-person team and the code that supports its agent-assisted development. Cory credits test-driven development and a consistent domain model with giving Claude useful examples. He recommends assigning agents neglected maintenance, such as flaky tests and linting, while engineers work on features. In one cleanup, an old domain name had to be changed in tables, foreign keys, and variable names. The team had deferred that work repeatedly. Cory expects more engineering work to focus on reliability, DevOps, and quality controls that let people outside engineering ship software. Automated gates still need a person to review the logic. For his own coding, Cory runs several Claude Code sessions in Ghostty and gives them small skill files. He favors examples and rules the codebase can enforce over long instruction files or agent memories that may carry irrelevant facts into later work. For marketing work, he provides the company's actual writing and shared materials. In both cases, the goal is to give agents context that other people can inspect and reuse. Massdriver Architect applies the same idea to infrastructure changes. Cory can ask for a Postgres module change while limiting the agent to development releases and staging environments. Release channels run plans, compliance scans, and real deployments. Claude connects to the database to check the requested feature, and Cory marks the release stable before it reaches production. An SQS FIFO example covers several configurations and the full provision, reapply, destroy, and rebuild lifecycle. Presets give developers examples and provide test cases. Shared provisioners keep common tooling in one place across modules. Cory says Terraform is easy compared with satisfying an organization's requirements. A database request has to meet its security, compliance, spending, and reliability rules. He expects citizen developers to choose services such as Vercel and Supabase, and thinks easier private networking would make those platforms stronger alternatives to the large cloud providers. He gives one warning from a music company with 63 applications spread across Vercel and employees' laptops. A sales tool stopped working when its creator took the laptop home. They end by discussing how engineers can support people who understand a business problem but not the software toolchain. Cory says domain experts should be able to iterate without waiting on an engineering backlog. Rejecting their work leaves the business with fewer ways to solve its problems. Collaboration around back-end changes is still unresolved. Massdriver's sales employee can publish applications through Architect without installing Git. The code is versioned in an immutable OCI registry and can later move into Git. Cory says engineers should build safe paths that let these new developers deliver useful software. Chapters: 00:00:00 Self-service infrastructure and the arrival of agents 00:03:11 An API built around infrastructure context 00:09:03 Agent identity and attribute-based permissions 00:15:54 A four-person team, agents, and technical debt 00:23:12 Future engineering roles and enforceable quality 00:30:20 Backlog zero and autonomy for citizen developers 00:34:29 Claude Code workflows, examples, and memory 00:40:54 Testing infrastructure changes before production 00:48:00 Reusable presets and shared provisioners 00:55:06 Terraform is easy; organizations are complex 00:57:09 Citizen developers and the future of cloud platforms 01:00:53 When production apps run on someone's laptop 01:03:23 Domain expertise, autonomy, and engineering's value 01:10:30 Collaboration beyond Git and code in OCI registries