Terraform deskilled us too. No one is saying, "SREs should configure their infra by hand sometimes to not lose that skill".
If AI can handle it, great! We have a new tool -- let's make the tool better.
Let's figure out how to use AI to make us detect and resolve issues faster, and even better, prevent issues. I've always said we can't consistently hit 5 9's without automatic detection and remediation. We are there now.
Let's get everyone to 5 9s with AI!
> SREs should configure their infra by hand sometimes to not lose that skill
Actually... yeah, I'd totally say that. Some SREs in my company never wrote a single line of HCL that wasn't a call to a in-house, pre-approved module. They think they know Terraform - they don't, and they don't know what's under these modules either.
I don't even have experience with Terraform at all...
I'm using something different myself: a Docker Compose + reverse proxy config + some other support files, pushed to a private GitHub repo, which then triggers a GitHub Actions workflow that leads to the repository being pulled on the VPS and the infrastructure to be "rebuilt" (docker compose up, reverse proxy graceful restart).
It's unclear if you even know what terraform is, because the system you described has little to do with it.
Terraform would be the code that brought that VM into existence.
Terraform, as with any language, is mostly useless for humans now. It is for the agents full stop. You are correct though, we need to know the underlying architecture and most importantly why it is the way it is.
That is not true of Terraform, nor any other language. If you aren't at minimum reading and understanding the code, you are bad at your job, full stop. More realistically, you should still be writing a lot of code, because most of the time you will waste more time trying to work with LLMs than doing it yourself.
Opus 5.5 is quite effective at generating Terraform for a "typical" app that needs a load balancer, compute, and a database or two. That's the exact sort of cookie-cutter, rote work that AI is perfect for and no one is really going to miss.
People are going to miss it if it means they start missing paycheques and get barred out of the job market. :/
AWS condensed 5 SMEs from the NOC into 1 expensive cPanel wannabe and so it goes, and will continue to go.
That ship (of Theseus) has sailed. Computing is going to become intensely personal again.
Along the same lines, Docker "deskilled" a lot of what used to be called "sysadmins."
No, Docker transformed the systems architecture such that system administration works completely differently now.
Docker is still a skill if you want to build your containers without AI help.