Why I Built kcore: Proxmox Broke My Automation One Too Many Times

After years running Proxmox in production, every automation attempt hit the same walls: an API bolted onto a web UI, mutable Debian hosts, Perl internals. So I built kcore — a modern, API-first hypervisor on NixOS. I've been running Proxmox for years. On paper, it's great: open source, KVM-based, web UI included. In practice, every time I tried to automate anything beyond the basics, I hit a wall. The API That Isn't Really an API Proxmox has a REST API. Technically. But it's a thin wrapper over the web UI, not a first-class interface. Try doing something simple like attaching a cloud-init drive or configuring a network bridge programmatically — you'll end up shelling out to qm or pvesh from your Terraform or Ansible playbook. The Terraform provider for Proxmox is a community project that constantly fights against API limitations. Half the time you're writing provisioner "remote-exec" blocks to run CLI commands on the host because the API simply doesn't expose what you need. That's not