GitOps provides a lot of advantages. We have a single source of truth of the desired state, automated sync, drift detection and reconciliation, and so on. However, our manifests are still too complex for everyone to understand. They tend to describe Kubernetes resources instead of applications. On the other hand, the tools that do treat applications as applications instead of resources, tend to be focused mostly on CLI and UI, often ignoring the need to define everything as code.

Can we combine both? Can we have application specs that are easy for developers to understand, write, and manage?