You can make mistakes in IAC just like in the GUI. If the difference is having a plan stage (which, again, quite often you still don't know what the change is b

You can make mistakes in IAC just like in the GUI. If the difference is having a plan stage (which, again, quite often you still don't know what the change is because it can't be known until apply), the GUI could offer a plan stage too. One of the things Terraform should have had from day 1 was automatic import of all existing cloud resources and generation of hcl. That would allow creation of infra in a GUI and then locking it down into a version controlled declarative configuration. Terraformer (written by a Google team) does exactly this, though it's rudimentary and lacks a lot. I still use it to quickly capture the state of legacy accounts and make changes later. Amazon should have had this for all its services by default, because it would prevent the need to manually craft code. GUIs exist to prevent people from having to slowly craft code by hand. I think people today still forget the entire purpose of GUIs because there's this cargo cult that says the only way to do anything good is to manually write lines of code. Personally I'd be happy if I never wrote another line of code in my life, if the GUI would just version the configuration. And even better, if the state were immutable and versioned and didn't need to be constantly "fixed" by a configuration management tool (Terraform).