Exercise 1: What "No Changes" Confirms, Connected to Chapter 1's Idempotency Exercise — Possible Solution ==================================================================== "No changes" is Terraform's plan output stating that, after comparing the configuration's declared desired state against the ACTUAL current state (the real hello.txt file now sitting on disk, tracked via Terraform's own state), the two already match exactly -- there is nothing left for Terraform to create, update, or destroy. This is a direct, concrete demonstration of Chapter 1 Exercise 1's own answer: a declarative tool avoids the "run it twice and it breaks" problem specifically BECAUSE it compares desired state against actual state before acting, rather than blindly re-executing a fixed sequence of steps. Chapter 1 explained this in the abstract; this chapter proves it in practice -- running `apply` a first time created the file (desired state didn't match actual state, so Terraform acted), and running `plan` again immediately afterward, with nothing having changed, produces genuinely zero planned actions, because desired state and actual state are now identical. Re-running the same configuration any further number of times would produce the exact same "No changes" result every time, which is the idempotency property named directly in that exercise's own solution. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This explicitly traces the "No changes" output back to the specific mechanism (desired-vs-actual-state comparison) Chapter 1 Exercise 1 already explained in the abstract, showing this chapter's real example as concrete proof of that same abstract claim rather than treating them as two unrelated facts.