Is there a way to programatically (re)define the "done" status of a resource? Use case: when creating a CRD managed by a kubernetes operator, I want to wait until the child resources are created by the operator.

Not directly - we are working on a few things that would make this more first class. For now though - you can write arbitrary code to wait for a condition and have things that depend on the CRD wait on that. An example of this is here: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-f5bigip/blob/master/examples/virtualappliance/index.ts#L13 (for a pretty different use case, but with the same goal to wait for an additional condition to be true before deploying further resources).

Thanks! Makes sense, but now let me ask you this: 🙂 is there any way to (arbitrarily) interact with kubernetes API from pulumi, or do I need to use a 3rd party kubernetes client library?

There is not.

That also makes sense, thanks both!