From Infrastructure Bottleneck to Developer Velocity: How "Aiden For Infrastructure" Transforms Platform Engineering

The Platform Engineering Paradox

The gap between platform engineering teams and developers has never been wider. Platform teams build sophisticated infrastructure blueprints with Terraform, security policies, and compliance guardrails. Meanwhile, developers just want to ship code—but they're stuck waiting days or weeks for infrastructure provisioning, navigating complex Infrastructure as Code configurations, or wrestling with ticket systems that slow everything down.

Enter Aiden (AI-DEvops-ENgineer): StackGen's DevOps AI Agent that fundamentally reimagines how platform teams enable developer self-service without sacrificing control, security, or governance.

Platform engineering teams face an impossible tradeoff: either lock down infrastructure to maintain security and compliance, creating bottlenecks and frustrated developers, or give developers direct access to cloud resources, risking security violations, cost overruns, and compliance failures.

Traditional solutions—internal developer portals, ticket systems, infrastructure templates—help but don't solve the core problem. They still require developers to understand infrastructure complexity, wait for approvals, or navigate rigid templates that don't fit their actual needs.

How Aiden Changes the Game

Aiden operates as a unified natural language interface that sits between your platform team's infrastructure governance and your developers' daily workflows. It's not just a chatbot—it's a sophisticated multi-agent system where specialized sub-agents work together to handle complex, orchestrated tasks across multiple platforms.

Here's what makes Aiden different: it understands both your platform team's governance requirements and your developers' business needs, translating between the two seamlessly.

The Producer Side: Platform Team Empowerment

Platform engineers (the "producers" in StackGen's model) set up Aiden workspaces that define exactly how infrastructure should be provisioned. This happens in three key steps:

1. Define What's Allowed

Platform teams establish the infrastructure resources available for each project, configure security settings for supported resources, and can even use GenAI-based editors to create custom policies. This ensures that whatever developers request automatically complies with your organization's security posture and compliance requirements.

2. Build Your Catalog

Import Terraform modules from private or public Git repositories into your StackGen catalog. Whether you build your own modules, hire experts for custom infrastructure, or leverage community modules from the Terraform registry, Aiden can work with your existing investments. StackGen even integrates with tools like Wiz to scan imported modules for security violations, keeping your CSO team happy.

3. Create AI Automation Skills

This is where Aiden's power really shines. Skills are LLM-based automations that define how Aiden should respond to specific developer requests. For example, you might create a "developer self-service" skill that responds to requests like "I need infrastructure for a web application" by automatically:

- Creating an AppStack with your approved AWS resources
- Adding the appropriate resource pack (like your "New Infra Template for Devs")
- Generating sane variable names for all Terraform variables
- Pushing the infrastructure as code to your designated Git repository

Each skill connects to a StackGen Expert that automatically handles the integrations and secrets required for execution. Platform teams define the "what" and "how" once, then Aiden handles thousands of developer requests consistently.

The Consumer Side: Developer Freedom Within Guardrails

Developers (the "consumers") get two distinct ways to work with infrastructure, depending on their needs:

Flow 1: High-Touch Infrastructure for Development

When developers need direct infrastructure control—for dev/test environments, POCs, or debugging—they can work directly with infrastructure through their IDE. Using the StackGen MCP integration with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or VS Code, developers can:

- Clone existing infrastructure AppStacks
- Make detailed modifications (like adjusting subnet configurations)
- Visualize changes side-by-side in StackGen's visual builder
- Push infrastructure changes directly to Git

This is perfect for the exploration phase where developers need to understand infrastructure behavior or rapidly iterate on architecture decisions.

Flow 2: Platform-Abstracted Blueprints for Production

When it's time to deploy to production, developers shift to a completely different mode. Instead of specifying infrastructure details, they make high-level requests through Aiden:

"I have a new webservice that I want to launch. I need production infrastructure on AWS. Raise a PR."

Aiden's skills kick in, automatically:

- Selecting the appropriate resource pack based on the request (ECS for web services, for example)
- Creating an AppStack with pre-approved configurations
- Filling variables using patterns from existing equivalent AppStacks
- Remediating any policy violations
- Raising a pull request for platform team review

Developers specify what they need, not how to build it. The platform team's governance, security policies, cost guardrails, and compliance requirements are automatically baked in.

Resolving The Paradox

This dual-flow approach solves the platform engineering paradox. Platform teams maintain complete control over production infrastructure patterns, security policies, and compliance requirements. They can audit everything through detailed logs of both AI agent and user activities.

Meanwhile, developers get the freedom to experiment during development and the speed of automated provisioning for production—without needing to become infrastructure experts.

The key is that Aiden isn't replacing platform engineers; it's amplifying them. One platform team can now support hundreds or thousands of developers through skills that encode the team's expertise, standards, and best practices. Every developer request gets handled with the same level of care and consistency, but at machine speed.

Beyond Traditional Infrastructure as Code

What makes this approach particularly powerful is how it meets developers where they already work. Whether they're in their IDE, using an internal developer portal, working through Backstage, or even submitting ServiceNow tickets, Aiden can integrate with existing workflows while maintaining consistent infrastructure governance underneath.

The infrastructure complexity that traditionally lived in the heads of senior platform engineers—knowing which resource packs to use, how to configure security groups, which variable patterns to follow—is now captured in Aiden skills that any developer can leverage through natural language.

Getting Started

Setting up Aiden requires coordination between your admin, platform team, and developers, but the process is straightforward. Admins create projects and workspaces at by signing up for Aiden, platform engineers define allowed resources and create skills, and developers get access through PAT tokens or direct workspace invitations.

The investment in setup pays dividends immediately as developers stop waiting for infrastructure and platform teams stop being bottlenecked by provisioning requests.

Platform engineering is about building the roads that developers drive on. Aiden ensures those roads are safe, compliant, and fast—while giving developers the autonomy to reach their destinations without platform teams riding shotgun on every journey.