The Only Claude Skill Every DevOps Engineer Needs

AWS FOR THE REAL WORLD

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Reading time: 5 minutes

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Main Learning: How to make Claude write production-ready Terraform instead of technical debt

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Watch on YouTube

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Blog Post

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GitHub Repository

Hey 👋🏽

We've been heads-down the past weeks. Preparing the live AMA workshops from Black Friday (sorry for the delay!) and recording new YouTube videos. It's been a lot of fun.

Speaking of videos - this week Tobi recorded one you'll want to watch.

Here's the problem: LLMs want to close the loop fast. They give you an answer, you feel productive, everyone's happy. Except... the code is garbage.

Without specific instructions, AI takes the path of least resistance:

Skipping module structure to ship faster
No version pinning or tagging strategy
"Allow all" IAM policies to avoid errors

You feel like a 10x engineer. But you're just automating technical debt.

This is where the Terraform Claude Skill comes in. Watch the video to see it in action 👇

📚 This Week's Deep Dive

The Terraform Claude Skill

Anton Babenko created this skill. If you've used Terraform, you've probably used his modules - they've been downloaded hundreds of millions of times.

The skill turns Claude from a "general-purpose engineer" into a Terraform and infrastructure pro.

It's built on four pillars:

1. The Engine
Claude follows a strict loop: init → validate → plan. It treats your state file as the source of truth.

2. The Guardrails
No more monolithic files. It enforces modularity, naming conventions, and tagging strategies that work for teams.

3. The Expert Brain
It handles complex logic like nested for_each loops and dynamic blocks. It also forces Claude to work with real documentation instead of hallucinating.

4. The Integrated Stack
Claude uses tflint for linting, tfsec for security checks, and infracost to show you costs before you deploy.

The result? Instead of code that "works," you get code that's production-ready.

We ran a comparison. Same prompt, with and without the skill. The difference was huge:

Skill version: Fully configurable variables, proper test structure, security checks, cost estimation
No skill: Hardcoded values, tests in wrong location, no security validation

Watch the full breakdown in our video. Tobi walks through the installation, shows real examples, and compares the output side by side.

🎬 Watch the Video →

That's it for this week!

If you're using Claude for infrastructure work, definitely check out the video. Seeing the side-by-side comparison really drives home the difference.

See you soon!
Sandro & Tobi