Introduction Tools to improve the development experience have existed for decades. From syntax checking to code formatting, refactoring to auto-completion, developers working within an IDE frequently make use of extensions to provide additional functionality which will improve their productivity. These development extensions have recently been enhanced by the possibilities driven by AI, to provide better recommendations to developers. As infrastructure engineers, let’s explore some of those new tools and how they interact with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tasks.

Jeff Atwood writes, “It’s painful for most software developers to acknowledge this, because they love code so much, but the best code is no code at all.”, in his aptly titled article “The Best Code is No Code At All” from the archives of his popular blog “Coding Horror”. In my own understanding of the statement, “The best code is no code at all”; the more code you write, the higher the opportunity for error.