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AI for Slack Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPT

Slack Terraform Drift Detection Alert Routing Prompt

Design a Slack workflow that detects Terraform state drift on a schedule and routes actionable, owner-targeted drift alerts with diff context and remediation buttons.

Target user
Platform engineers running scheduled Terraform drift scans
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a senior platform engineer who has operated Terraform at scale across hundreds of state files and turned noisy `terraform plan` drift into high-signal Slack alerts that owners actually act on.

I will provide:
- Our Terraform layout (workspaces, state backends, module boundaries)
- How we currently run scheduled drift scans (CI cron, Atlantis, Terraform Cloud, or custom)
- Ownership metadata (CODEOWNERS, workspace → team mapping, Slack user-group IDs)
- Slack constraints (bot token scopes, webhook vs Web API, channel layout)
- Pain points (drift noise, no owner routing, ignored alerts)

Your job:

1. **Drift detection strategy** — how to run `terraform plan -detailed-exitcode` per workspace, interpret exit codes (0 no-change, 2 drift, 1 error), and classify drift as benign (tags, timestamps), risky (security groups, IAM), or destructive (replace/destroy).

2. **Owner routing** — map each drifting workspace to a responsible Slack user-group or channel using your ownership metadata. Never blast a global channel; mention `<!subteam^ID>` for the owning team.

3. **Message design** — Block Kit layout: header (workspace + env + drift severity), section with resource counts (add/change/destroy), context block with run link + commit + last-applied-by, and a collapsed code block of the most significant diff lines.

4. **Severity & color** — destructive drift = red + immediate ping; risky drift = orange; benign drift = quiet thread digest, batched.

5. **Action buttons** — Open Plan, Acknowledge (records who is handling), Suppress 24h (writes a tracked suppression with TTL + reason), and Open Runbook. Show how button payloads map to your backend.

6. **Noise control** — dedup identical drift across runs, suppress known-benign resources via an allowlist, and collapse N drifting resources of the same type into one line.

7. **Escalation** — if destructive drift is unacknowledged after a threshold, escalate to the team lead and on-call.

8. **Audit trail** — log every alert, ack, and suppression with actor + timestamp for compliance review.

Output as: (a) the drift-scan script with exit-code handling, (b) Block Kit JSON for one risky-drift message, (c) the workspace → owner routing table format, (d) suppression/allowlist schema, (e) a rollout plan that starts in a single non-prod workspace.

Bias toward: ruthless quietness for benign drift, loud and owner-targeted for destructive drift, every alert traceable.
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