AI-Managed Infrastructure

Because Terraform was never meant for humans

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

Given the Claude-deleted-a-production-database story going around, now seems like a good time to advocate for AI managing your infrastructure.

Last week I granted AdministratorAccess to Claude Code for an isolated AWS account. Asked it to set up Grafana. 17 minutes. Then the full LGTM observability stack including supporting infrastructure (ECS, RDS, volumes, networking, etc) and a working hello world app to prove that the stack was working. 22 minutes.

I’d been meaning to properly explore Grafana for years. Infra setup was always one of the hurdles that made it feel like a big undertaking. That blocker is gone now.

No, don’t give Claude access to your production environment. But it is time to identify what environments we can hand off to AI.

A lot of what slows down software innovation is skill cleavages — the handoffs between frontend and backend, between application engineers and DevOps. Every boundary between specializations is a place where one person’s idea has to become someone else’s ticket.

Those boundaries are collapsing. I no longer need to go through a DevOps team to spin up infrastructure. The side app we built to track our token spend just runs. Claude manages the infra. If it deletes the database, we’re back in five minutes.

This means I can run software that previously I simply wouldn’t have. Not because I couldn’t write it, but because owning the full stack was too much overhead for a side project or an experiment.

So yes, be careful with production. But I’ll be disappointed if AI doesn’t delete at least one of our non-prod environments this year. If it doesn’t, it probably means we’re leaving velocity and innovation on the table.