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. Dan and Cory discuss what infrastructure agents need to act safely. Massdriver models environments and resource relationships so agents can query context directly, while separate agent identities and attribute-based permissions constrain their access. Cory describes a staging workflow that tests infrastructure changes through real deployments before he promotes a release to production. Cory explains how a tested, consistent codebase supports his team's Claude Code workflow, why enforceable tooling matters more than long instruction files, and why human review still matters. He argues that engineers should build quality controls and deployment paths for domain experts who can now create software themselves, with collaboration and operational ownership still needing attention. Full episode notes Transcript Chapters (00:00) - Self-service infrastructure and the arrival of agents (03:11) - An API built around infrastructure context (09:03) - Agent identity and attribute-based permissions (15:54) - A four-person team, agents, and technical debt (23:12) - Future engineering roles and enforceable quality (30:20) - Backlog zero and autonomy for citizen developers (34:29) - Claude Code workflows, examples, and memory (40:54) - Testing infrastructure changes before production (48:00) - Reusable presets and shared provisioners (55:06) - Terraform is easy; organizations are complex (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 ⠀ Links from the show -------------------- Massdriver Massdriver Architect The Citizen Developer Cory O'Daniel's personal website Terraform OpenTofu Postgres GraphQL Kubernetes attribute-based access control test-driven development domain-driven design Ghostty Checkov Wiz Snyk GitOps OCI Elixir Golang ⠀ Guests ------- Cory O'Daniel, CEO & Co-Founder, Massdriver Website LinkedIn ⠀ Follow the podcast ------------------- LinkedIn Threads Instagram TikTok ⠀ Follow Dan Gerlanc ------------------- X LinkedIn Threads Bluesky