Pavlo Baron, co-founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, unpacks what’s changing in platform engineering as AI reshapes who gets to build, and how infrastructure actually gets managed.

Baron traces the origin story back to his time building high-scale systems at Instana (which exited to IBM in 2020), where the reality of “always-on” platforms made one thing obvious: the tooling we rely on is often too low-level, too rigid, and too disconnected from real-world use cases. That gap has only widened as environments have exploded in complexity—more cloud providers, more managed services, more hybrid setups, more internal APIs, and “gillions” of tools stitched together into brittle workflows.

One of the most interesting themes is the idea that, in the age of AI, we’re all builders now. The same wave that’s enabling “vibe coding” for non-traditional developers is also changing expectations for infrastructure work. Baron argues that classic IaC models, especially the provider ecosystem around tools like Terraform, were effectively designed for top-tier software engineers, even though many people operating in the broader DevOps and infrastructure world learned by scripting and iterating until the job gets done.

Platform Engineering Labs’ answer is to make infrastructure extensibility feel more like a natural part of the workflow. Instead of waiting on someone else to write a complex provider, or being stuck if you disagree with how it’s implemented, teams can use AI-assisted development to create the integrations they need (GitLab, Jira, internal systems) quickly, then verify them against a robust test suite for safety and repeatability.

Baron also emphasizes community and openness: the project is open source, active on GitHub, with a growing set of plugins plus ways to connect via Discord, blogs, and LinkedIn. The goal is simple: remove the stones in the road so more engineers can build what they need—without unnecessary cycles, ceremony, or delay.