Exercise 2: What the Plan-as-PR-Comment Pattern Shows Beyond the .tf Diff — Possible Solution ==================================================================== A raw `.tf` file diff shows only the TEXTUAL change to the configuration -- which lines were added, removed, or edited. It says nothing about the ACTUAL, real-world CONSEQUENCE of that textual change, because Terraform's behavior in response to a given edit isn't always obvious just from reading it. The chapter's own example makes this concrete: "a one-line variable change can produce a plan that recreates a dozen resources." Someone reading only the diff sees a single changed line -- say, a variable's default value edited, or a `count`/`for_each` collection modified in a way that shifts positional indices (exactly Chapter 3 Exercise 2's own scenario). Nothing in that one-line diff visually signals "this is about to destroy and recreate 12 real resources" -- that consequence only becomes visible by actually running Terraform's own plan logic against the real dependency graph and real current state. Posting the ACTUAL `plan` output as a PR comment surfaces exactly that hidden consequence, in Terraform's own `+`/`-`/`~` notation, before anyone approves the merge -- the reviewer sees precisely what will be created, destroyed, or changed in real infrastructure, not just what text changed in a file. This lets a reviewer catch a genuinely dangerous change (an unintended mass-destroy-and-recreate, say) that would have been completely invisible from the diff alone, and would otherwise only have been discovered after `apply` had already run. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This uses the chapter's own concrete example (a one-line change causing a dozen recreations) to show specifically why a diff alone can't reveal Terraform's actual planned consequence, rather than a generic "plan is more informative than a diff" claim.