At scale, human review of Terraform plans stops being a safety mechanism and starts being a bottleneck. Today's instinct is to delegate to AI, but AI review breaks compliance requirements, can miss edge cases, and removes human accountability from a pipeline where accountability matters. This talk is about a third path: evaluating Terraform plans programatically and deterministically using conftest. Policy-as-code that you can reason about, version, test, and trust, not because a model said so, but because the rules are explicit and the outcome is reproducible. As AI-generated infrastructure changes become routine, safe auto-apply isn't a nice-to-have, it's the next thing you need to build into your infrastructure pipeline.
Ricard is a Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Cisco ThousandEyes' SRE team. He is responsible for a Terraform pipeline with 500+ developers, over 140k resources under management, and multiple thousands of plans a day. Ricard is currently writing a book about homelabbing, so go talk to him if you have a homelab!
