Yes hitting apply would update the production infrastructure, but what if I want to run automated testing to check a change/new feature? I can't do that on a simulation.

Right - obviously, if you need the actual code deployed to run your test, there is not much anyone can do about that. But let me tell you how you would set that up, from scratch, in System Initiative (assuming you have a working deployment at all).

I assume the use case here is 'I want to deploy the application on every pull request to net-new infrastructure, then run my test suite, and destroy the test infrastructure once the PR is merged or the code is updated'.

You would fire up the AI Agent and ask it to discover an existing deployment of the application. Probably give it a hint or the boundaries you care about (stop at the network layer, for example - you probably don't want to deploy a net new VPC, subnets, or internet gateways). Once that's done, you'll have a model of the infrastructure for your application in System Initiative.

Then you'll turn that into a repeatable template component, by either asking the AI to do it for you, or selecting the related infrastructure in our Web UI and hitting 'T'. You'll add some attributes like 'version' to the template, and plumb them through to right spot in the code we generate for you.

Then you're going to call that code from our GitHub action on every PR, setting the name and the version number from the branch and the artifact version, naming the change set after the PR as well. You'll let the action apply the change set itself, which will then create the infrastructure.

The next step will be to run your tests against the infrastructure.

On merge you'll have another GitHub action that opens a change set and deletes the infrastructure you just created, so you don't waste any cash.

Notice what I didn't tell you to do - figure out how to create new state files, build new CI/CD pipelines, or anything else. Just started from the actual truth of what you already have, used our digital twins to make a repeatable template out of it, then told the platform to do it over and over again with an external API.

Hope that helps it make sense.