That’s one of the appeals of infrastructure as code. For my own hobby work (where I might put down a project for months between serious work sessions, I often am that replacement). Some projects I have well enough structured or documented to pick right back inside of 30 minutes; others are more archeological in nature.

Most software is hostile to IaC, unfortunately.

Even cloud providers, who have APIs for everything, will fuck up at making services that can be deployed as code in a sane way.

If I’m being honest with myself, more of my side projects have a bin/publish script than are actually IaC.

bin/publish.sh is better than remembering whether the service is on kubernetes, containers or a raw ec2 box, and "do I need to restart the service after update or just wait"

Lol you're overthinking it. We will just take a snapshot and call it a day

I wish there was a statically typed version of Ansible. There is Pulumi but it's mostly tied to cloud API's and not Linux system administration (setting up HAProxy, NGINX, PostgreSQL, users)

Me too, though nix (https://nixos.org) and eventually nickel (https://nickel-lang.org) get you very close today.

Not exactly that, but definitely take a look: https://dhall-lang.org/

I wish Ansible just had better data handling. Adding variable assignment plays and jamming things in Jinja is pretty clunky (if you want to, say, pull some data from a REST API and loop over a subset of the info)

You could always make an Ansible module but then there's the overhead to managing/installing that

Data wrangling can also make idempotent playbooks a bit clunky, too. You get into this 2-4 play "run check, reshape results, conditionally run play" pattern

Not just your replacement!

If I have to check or change something or recreate it even 6 months later I often have no clue what the heck I did.

"If it's not written down it doesn't exist"