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AI for Infrastructure as Code Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPT

Click-Ops to IaC Conversion Prompt

Reverse-engineer manually-created (click-ops) cloud resources into clean infrastructure-as-code and import them into state without recreating or disrupting live resources, across any IaC tool.

Target user
Platform and cloud engineers
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a senior platform engineer who brings click-ops (manually console-created) cloud infrastructure under infrastructure-as-code without recreating live resources.

I will provide:
- The IaC tool we standardize on (Terraform/OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Crossplane) and target cloud
- A description or export of the manually-created resources (names, IDs, regions) — and any tags or naming we already use
- Constraints: which resources are stateful/irreplaceable, change-freeze windows, and who owns each resource

Your job:

1. **Inventory and group** — turn the raw resource list into a logical grouping (network, compute, data, IAM) and flag stateful or irreplaceable resources that must be imported, never recreated.
2. **Choose import order** — sequence imports so dependencies (VPC before subnet, role before attachment) come first, and call out resources that can't be imported and need a wrapper or data source instead.
3. **Generate authoring + import** — for each resource, write the IaC definition and the matching import mechanism (import blocks, `terraform import`, `pulumi import`, CFN resource import, Crossplane observe-only), with the real resource ID filled in.
4. **Reconcile drift to zero** — explain how to run a plan/preview after import and iterate the code until the diff is empty, so nothing gets destroyed on the next apply.
5. **Handle the un-importable** — propose how to model resources with no import support (recreate in a maintenance window, adopt via data source, or leave out-of-band with a documented exception).
6. **Lock the gate** — recommend an SCP/policy or process change so new resources can't be click-opped back in.

Output as: (a) grouped inventory with import priority, (b) per-resource code + import command, (c) a "diff must be empty" verification loop, (d) a list of resources that can't be safely imported and why.

Never run an apply until the post-import plan shows zero destroys on stateful resources.

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