Infrastructure Automation That Behaves Like Reality: System Initiative’s “Digital Twin” Approach to DevOps (and Agents)

What if the reason infrastructure automation feels brittle isn’t because teams are doing it wrong, but because the underlying assumptions are wrong?

In this Commit & Push episode, host Damien Filiatrault talks with Brit Myers, VP of Engineering at System Initiative, about why the Terraform/GitOps era hit a ceiling, and what an “AI-native” platform looks like when you rebuild infrastructure automation around collaboration, simulations, and a true one-to-one model of the real world.

Rethinking the Old DevOps Contract

System Initiative positions itself as an AI-native infrastructure automation platform: if Terraform or GitOps pipelines can do it, System Initiative can too, but with a different foundation.

Brit describes the motivation as dissatisfaction with where the industry landed after 10–15 years of DevOps tooling. The promise was always smoother automation, safer change, faster feedback. The reality for many teams is still “merge and pray.”

System Initiative’s bet is that you don’t fix that with more pipelines or more glue, you fix it by changing the core model.

The Two Assumptions They Want to Break

1) “Infrastructure automation must be static declarative files”

Terraform assumes infrastructure automation starts with declarative configuration: authored, versioned, and processed in a largely one-way flow.

Brit argues that’s only clean when everything behaves like “cattle” (disposable, stateless). But real infrastructure includes plenty of “pets” too, systems that need care, constraints, and flexibility.