[throwaway823882]

Been there. If Mitchell or anyone else on the core team doesn't want a feature to work a certain way, or feels that a bug isn't a bug, or maybe they want to wait until the next big release to look at something, tough luck for us. I suppose I have to become a Terraform developer in my spare time, and then I only need to spend years fighting the corporation that owns it over how to design it to actually function the way humans need it to.

Terraform doesn't look for existing resources. It doesn't properly plan for new values. It doesn't have a convention to define resources that can or can't be used idempotently. It doesn't support modern deployment methods. It doesn't make a best effort to fix things even when it clearly can detect what the solution or user's intent is. It can't auto import resources, even when it knows that something already exists, and it won't remove something in its own state when you're trying to import it, even though you clearly want to replace what's in state with what you're importing. And it's a monolith, so it's not like we can change small parts to fix our use cases.

There's no amount of GitHub issues or mailing lists that will fix all this crap. Some of it is poor functionality, some of it is buggy functionality, and some of it is just bad design. It needs to be redesigned, and its components separated so they can be replaced or improved as needed, without editing Go code or a DSL.

But mainly, it needs to work the way humans need it to work in production. Not the way a bunch of idealistic devs think is theoretically the best way. "Just don't ever touch an AWS account at all by any means other than Terraform. What's so hard about that?" Nobody who has an actual live product used by customers [for money] could possibly survive this way without hours of outages and weeks of delays. If your tool is designed for an impossible scenario, then it's impossible to use it "properly".

[jen20]

> Terraform doesn't look for existing resources.

This is 100% at odds with your stated goal of predictability.

> It doesn't make a best effort to fix things even when it clearly can detect what the solution or user's intent is.

As is this.

> It can't auto import resources, even when it knows that something already exists, and it won't remove something in its own state when you're trying to import it, even though you clearly want to replace what's in state with what you're importing.

I’m noticing a pattern with your stated desires being at odds with your stated goals.

FWIW, I manage dozens of accounts which no one touches outside of TF (or other similar tools) and have worked this way since 2016 with basically no issues.