> Incus wants to own the VM lifecycle the way libvirtd does, and once you have that you're back to "two sources of truth" if you ever shell out.

That's true. But I didn't want to reinvent what Incus or any hypervisor abstraction does. I simply wanted to add some sugar on top that allows me to easily declare infra using small abstractions, and to tie in the provisioning aspect along the way. I still use Incus directly, and can benefit from their work, as you say. State is also managed by Pulumi, so really, there are 3 places for it to exist. There are some challenges with this, of course, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.

Good luck with your project, I'll be keeping an eye on it. I'll probably make a Show HN post when I release mine. Cheers!