The Promise None of Them Kept
Summary
The article analyzes promise theory and explains why traditional infrastructure-as-code tools struggle to observe, reason, and act autonomously. It argues that the missing reasoning layer is provided by LLMs and introduces Swamp as an observation-first automation framework with versioned data, CEL-based decision logic, and workflow-driven actions. It then compares Terraform, Ansible, CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet, outlines practical differences, and discusses implications for operators and automation strategies.