Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What changes when the code is infrastructure The source diff does not predict the effect. Declarative code is evaluated through a dependency graph, so a one-line change can replace a database and a two-hundred-line refactor can change nothing. The plan is the review artefact. Terraform will tell you, before you commit to anything, exactly which resources it intends to create, update, replace or destroy — in JSON, with a fixed vocabulary. Reviewing the plan beats reviewing the HCL. The HCL shows intent; the plan shows consequence. Only one of those is what production experiences. The agent never holds apply credentials. Propose, plan, evaluate, review, apply — and the agent's authority ends at the first of those five. Guardrails go in layers, and every layer misses something. Read-only…
