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From pg's Do Things That Don't Scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

"Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.

..."At YC we use the term "Collison installation" for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot."

Might be worth focussing on onboarding.

Idk man, I agree with OP. Writing YAML configs is one of my least favorite things to do. Might be worth polling more people

I agree. A lot of people were asking about this. We will do our best to help.

First thing we want to do is an interactive CLI "tour" that auto-detects the project type, asks a few basic questions, and generates the YAML for you. Should be released in ~1-2 weeks.

Second thing we are thinking about is a visual GUI. Will be harder, but doable. We can integrate it into the local development studio.

I haven't looked at what your yaml is looking like, but I encourage you to consider having sensible defaults for most resource types (including their existence), and provide a way for Devs to go off the rails if they need to. Sensible defaults can get simpler use cases 95-100% of the way there, relieving the burden for app Devs to have good understanding of everything that is going on under the hood.

This is exactly what Stacktape does.

For example, the "HTTP API Gateway" resources has 0 required properties you need to configure.

We have sensible defaults for everything. We also try to automatically infer as many things as possible.

To counter this, it is so easy to write YAML I don't get the fuss. And this coming from someone who took a long time to learn Python.

Perhaps the issue is not the writing of the YAML, but the need to have a good understanding of all the resources/primatives in order to get things glued together. Many application developers just want to focus on their application, and not on all the nuances of subnets, security groups, autoscaling thresholds etc.

> Perhaps the issue is not the writing of the YAML, but the need to have a good understanding of all the resources/primatives in order to get things glued together.

This and the fear of making a mistake with the most important configuration file of the application.

OP this is a clear opporutinty for Stacktape.

> I understand that you don't like writing YAML, but to be honest, it's not that complicated, especially if you use our VS code extension (it autocompletes and suggest all the properties, validates the config file, and give you on-hover documentation).

I think you've missed the point entirely. Just because _you_ do not find it complicated, doesnt mean others wont. This comes across dismissive, people dont want to use your flavor of YAML and have to install a VSCode extension to do so effectively. This alienates a bunch of people that dont use VSCode, and who would rather utilize a safely typed library that provides autocomplete out of the box regardless of which editor is being used. IaaC/S should move on from thousand long lined YAML files that shoe-horn in extensibility and composition in favor of using tools (programming languages) that support this out of the box. These libraries could output YAML files for the sake of compatibility.