The more I look at how we actually build systems now, the more it looks like Terraform is dead. Not “declining.” Not “evolving.” Dead. What’s left is just inertia. What Terraform Actually Solved Terraform solved a very specific problem: how do we make infrastructure deterministic, reviewable, and repeatable? The answer was a DSL, a plan step, and a state file. It worked, and it still works. But it also forced an awkward compromise. Humans ended up describing intent in a language that was never designed to express it, and HCL is not how anyone actually thinks about systems.