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Delete the Terraform state file. Redeploy. Nothing happens.
That's the acceptance test: 0 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy. It's the only one I trust here, because it exercises every path at once.
We generate Terraform into customer's own GCP projects, so the starting state is never empty. Rather than create, the generator emits import blocks and adopts what is already there.
But an import block for a resource that doesn't exist is a hard error, so something has to answer "does this exist?" first. That answer is one Cloud Asset Inventory scan, and three times the inventory and Terraform disagreed about what a resource is even called: service accounts by numeric uid rather than email, Firestore by project number rather than project id, and Pub/Sub schemas and Scheduler jobs never returned at all.
Absence from an inventory looks exactly like absence from the cloud. That one cost the most.
Existence isn't enough either. A clean plan would have put a whole tenant on hello-world, because regenerated HCL still carries the placeholder image. Adoption has to ask what each service is actually running, and pin to that.
What's your acceptance test for losing state?
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One architectural decision changed everything.
"We don't deploy into our own cloud."
Customers design their backend visually. Our platform generates the Terraform. It deploys straight into their cloud account — not ours.
That sentence sounds simple.
In practice it forced us to rethink five things:
• Terraform state architecture — one isolated state per service, not one shared state per customer
• Identity separation — every tenant runs on its own scoped credentials, sealed off from the rest
• Existing-resource adoption — customers already have infrastructure, so we import it instead of fighting it
• Parallel deployments — many resources at once, without stepping on each other
• Runtime vs infrastructure health — "did it deploy" and "is it healthy" are different questions
The hard part was never generating Terraform.
It was making a system safe enough that someone would point it at their production account.
I designed and built this end to end — the architecture, the Terraform generation, the deploy pipeline.
If your team is heading somewhere similar, or you're about to point automation at a customer's production account for the first time, happy to compare notes. 👋
Love the clean design
I spent 20 years running technology in regulated companies. Sat through a lot of AI demos. They all looked great until someone from compliance asked what happens when it gets something wrong, and nobody ever had a good answer.
So when I built my own agent platform, I made the log the whole point. You can see every step , what the agent read, what it decided, what it was allowed to touch. If it reaches for a tool nobody gave it, the run stops there and says so.
The screenshot is a real run. Step 4 fails. I left it in because that's the part people actually need to see.
There are 23 agents in it you can clone and call from your own code in about a minute. Contract review, invoice extraction, resume screening, that sort of thing. There's also one running on my own site that answers from my documentation and tells you which page it pulled the answer from. Ask it something hard , if it doesn't know, it'll say so.
