I was a Terraform believer. I had written hundreds of .tf files. I had debugged state corruption at 2 AM. I had carefully designed remote backends in S3 with DynamoDB locking so my team wouldn't step on each other. I had given internal talks about Terraform best practices. If you had asked me two years ago whether I'd ever move away from it, I would have laughed. And then I started using MechCloud — a stateless Infrastructure-as-Code platform that treats live cloud APIs as the source of truth instead of a state file — and I had to rethink a lot of things I took for granted. This is not a hit piece on Terraform. It is still an exceptional tool with a massive ecosystem. But the experience of working without a state file made me realise how much mental overhead I had quietly normalised over the years, without even questioning it. Here is what I learned. What "stateless" actually means Before I explain why I moved, I need to clarify what "stateless IaC" means — because it sounds paradoxical at first.…