Apr 4, 2025 4 min read IaC

Infrastructure as Code Without Trust: How Terracotta AI is Closing the Gap Between Code and Reality

Closing the Gap Between Terraform and Reality

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) promised predictability. But in reality, keeping your Terraform—or any IaC—code in sync with what’s actually running in the cloud is far more complex than it seems.

IaC is supposed to be the blueprint for your infrastructure. Every change is versioned, and every deployment is intentional. But cloud environments and teams move fast.

Manual changes, CI/CD automation, and shared modules introduce subtle but dangerous inconsistencies. Sooner or later, what’s deployed no longer matches what’s defined—and you’ve lost trust in your infrastructure.

Introducing Terracotta AI

That’s why we built Terracotta AI.

Terracotta is an AI Infrastructure-as-Code developer platform built for real-world engineering teams. We help developers write, review, and manage IaC confidently with two core capabilities:

An AI IDE Assistant that helps you write Terraform and IaC faster and more accurately
AI-powered contextual PR Reviews that explain exactly what’s changing—and why it matters

Terracotta isn’t another IaC wrapper. It’s a developer-first platform designed to restore trust in what you ship.

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The Hidden Risk of Infrastructure Drift

Even with the most rigorous CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows, drift happensDrift happens even with the most rigorous CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows

All it takes is:

A hotfix was applied manually in the AWS console
A misconfigured script running outside of Terraform
An outdated or corrupted state file

And suddenly, your plan looks fine—but your infrastructure isn't.

Traditional Terraform workflows assume:

✅ The state is current

✅ The plan reflects reality

✅ Reviewers understand the implications of the diff

In reality, most teams operate in the dark. This leads to:

Out-of-date plans that miss critical changes
Risky deploys built on incorrect assumptions
Infrastructure bugs that get caught after they hit production

✅ Example: A Terracotta AI Drift Report

Below is a real-world drift report generated by Terracotta AI:

Below is the summary of the drift report:

The report indicates that all 9 resources checked are completely in sync with the intended configuration.
There are no drifted resources (totalDriftedResources = 0).
Additionally, there were no permission issues, unsupported resources, or missing resources detected.
In summary, everything is unchanged and operating as expected.
List of drifted resources:
• None

This means your current deployment perfectly matches your Terraform configuration.

What This Means:

Your deployment is entirely in sync with your declared infrastructure-as-code. There are no surprises, shadow changes, or misaligned policies.

Terracotta helps ensure that your Terraform code remains the trustworthy source of truth—not just an assumption.

What Makes Terracotta Different

Terracotta is more than a drift detector. It's a full-stack developer experience for Infrastructure as Code—powered by AI and built for scale.

Let’s walk through what that actually looks like.

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💻 1. AI IDE Assistant

Writing IaC is still frustrating. Provider docs go out of date, resource blocks are repetitive, and you forget which input a module needs.

Terracotta’s AI IDE Assistant lives inside your editor and helps you:

Autocomplete resource blocks with real cloud context
Suggest valid arguments based on your cloud provider
Warn you about deprecated fields or missing tags
Visualize dependencies and outputs across modules

It’s like having a staff-level platform engineer pair-programming with you—without the Slack delay.

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📦 2. Contextual AI PR Reviews

Terraform pull requests are notoriously hard to review. The diffs are dense. The plan output is unreadable. And the context is buried in assumptions.

Terracotta flips the script. Every PR is enriched with:

A natural language summary of what’s changing
Highlights of high-risk changes (like deletions or open ingress)
Warnings about cost, dependency impact, or unexpected drift
Security and compliance checks in context

Terracotta doesn’t just show changes—it explains them in the context of your entire deployment pipeline.

🧩 3. Works With Real-World Infrastructure

Terracotta supports the messy, complex stacks most teams have:

Terraform, Terragrunt, Atlantis, CICDs and more
Mono repos and microservice IaC
Shared modules and deeply nested states
Multi-account and multi-cloud environments

We don't hide complexity—we make it manageable. We also help your team stay aligned even when things are moving quickly.

💬 Real-Time Chat Inside Your PRs—Powered by Context

Reviewing Terraform changes is hard enough. What if you could ask a question inside the PR and get a precise, context-aware answer?

With Terracotta’s real-time AI chat, you can.

Terracotta adds an interactive chat assistant to every infrastructure pull request. It’s trained on:

Your code diff
Your Terraform plan output
Your live infrastructure metadata
Your deployment history and drift reports

This means you can ask questions like:

“Why is this security group being recreated?”

“Will this delete any resources in production?”

“Is this an existing IAM policy or a new one?”

And get clear, actionable answers—instantly.

Instead of digging through modules, guessing at resource dependencies, or waiting on a senior engineer to reply in Slack, your team can move faster with in-PR guidance from an AI that understands your stack.

Terracotta’s chat assistant turns every PR into a shared understanding—so reviewers can ask better questions and authors can catch issues before they hit apply.

Why This Matters

When infrastructure changes are hard to understand, teams slow down. They stop reviewing PRs closely. They lose confidence in Terraform. They fall back to clicking in the console.

Terracotta is here to fix that—with a better experience for infrastructure developers from start to finish.

We help you:

✅ Catch drift before it causes incidents

✅ Review IaC changes with confidence

✅ Ship Terraform faster, safer, and with more trust across your team