Plan and review: the golden rule

If you remember one habit from this whole course, make it this: AI drafts, a plan and a human decide. Every infrastructure change an assistant suggests goes through the same gate as any other change, and the AI origin makes that gate more important, not less.

The reason is the blind spots from the last lesson. Because the model cannot see your account state, only a plan or diff run against your real environment can tell you what a change will actually do. A suggestion that looks harmless in chat may show up in the plan as replace or destroy on a resource you cannot afford to lose. The word replace on a database or a stateful volume is the difference between a routine change and an outage.

The golden loop:

• Draft with AI. Get the config or the change written.
• Read it yourself. Understand every line. Shipping code you do not understand because it seemed to work is how quiet mistakes reach production.
• Run a plan or diff. Let the deterministic tool that sees your account show the real effect.
• Review the plan, ideally with a second person for anything risky. Look hardest at anything marked destroy, replace, or a change to counts and sizes.
• Apply, then confirm. Check that reality matches intent.

You can even bring AI back in to help read the plan, which is the next module. But the accountability stays human. Automation that a machine both writes and applies unattended is exactly where teams get burned.