> What I want: Use Terraform programmatically, i.e. call "cdktf deploy" or similar FROM node or python and give users some scripts they can use where I can abstract away some of the difficulties of learning to use Terraform natively for simple use cases (i.e. deploy an S3-based frontend host). Ideally, I had intended to distribute some npm-installable packages which would run this stuff.

This is actually exactly the use case we’ve designed the Pulumi Automation API (https://www.pulumi.com/blog/automation-api/) to support.

Allowing modern IaC technology (like Pulumi or Terraform) to be easily embedded into custom software solutions, instead of just being something humans work with directly, is a huge potential enabler for the next wave of cloud infrastructure management tooling.

> What I want: Use Terraform programmatically, i.e. call "cdktf deploy" or similar FROM node or python and give users some scripts they can use where I can abstract away some of the difficulties of learning to use Terraform natively for simple use cases (i.e. deploy an S3-based frontend host).

Maybe not node/python, but I'm pretty sure you can use terraform as a package in go. If not, there is always the "make temp dir, write/download files necessary tf files, run terraform apply"

That's good to know at least; will give the go API a look. The latter option you're recommending is essentially what I went with (Node bin script that shells out to run cdktf commands).