Someone Changed Infra by Hand. Terraform Plan Is a Mess.
A manual console change put Terraform's state out of sync, and the next plan wants to undo it. Defend how you reconcile it.
the decision you defend
An engineer made a change in the cloud console by hand, and now terraform plan shows a confusing diff that wants to revert their change. State and reality are out of sync. How do you reconcile this safely?
the situation
You run terraform plan before a routine change and get a large, confusing diff: Terraform wants to revert several settings on a load balancer and a security group. Nothing in your code changed.
context
An on-call engineer made a quick fix directly in the cloud console during an incident last night and did not record it in code. State is in a shared remote backend. You are not yet sure whether their manual change was correct and should stay, or was a temporary hack.
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 5 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.