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You Need To Learn How TF Works Before You Can Use Agents

AI is making infrastructure faster to deploy. And destroy.

Author

Matt Gowie
July 28, 2026

Hey folks,

Today, AI is making infrastructure faster to deploy. But it's also making it faster to destroy.

There was a post going around a few months ago about someone who used an AI agent to set up their infrastructure with Terraform. They ended up nuking their production database and all of their snapshots in the process. The data impacted included:

2.5 years of all submissions [to the platform]: homework, projects, leaderboard entries, for every course

Alexey Grigorev

A few thoughts on this horror story:

  1. That operator got lucky. AWS happened to have a snapshot they could recover from. That's not guaranteed and I'm genuinely surprised this person lucked out. If that snapshot didn't exist, that's permanent data loss. That could blow up the entire business.

  2. This is exactly why you need experienced people managing AI agents. IaC is powerful. It can create AND destroy infrastructure with equal speed. If you don't understand what a tf apply is actually doing under the hood, you're handing a loaded gun to a bot and hoping for the best.

  3. AI is accelerating us, but it's also impacting reliability. We're going to keep seeing incidents like this from teams and individuals who try to do too much, too fast, without the prerequisite experience to understand what can go wrong.

Speed without understanding is just a faster path to shooting yourself in the foot.

Terraform isn't the problem.

AI isn't the problem.

The problem is skipping the part where you actually learn how the thing works before you automate it.

If you're using AI to write and deploy IaC -- awesome. But make sure someone on the team actually understands what's being deployed. Otherwise you're one bad apply away from blowing up your whole product.

May your infra team be both knowledgeable and speedy,

Matt @ Masterpoint

PS If you want to chat about how we help ship infrastructure fast and upskill our clients at the same time, grab some time on my calendar here. Also, did you know we have a referral program where you can make some extra cash? Know someone who needs some IaC expertise? Intro us and help out Masterpoint, one of your colleagues, and yourself at the same time.