Infrastructure as Code Context Engineering

Bulding infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions often requires managing complex configurations and dependencies, and if you’re not careful, you can quickly create a tangled mess. If you then apply AI tools like GitHub Copilot to assist you, you might end up with even more chaos if the AI doesn’t have the right context to work with.

To address this challenge, we can leverage the principles of context engineering to provide AI tools with the necessary context to generate accurate and efficient IaC code. This involves creating a structured environment where the AI can access relevant information about the infrastructure requirements, existing configurations, and best practices. In this post, I’ll share some of the techniques I’ve found useful when applying context engineering to IaC projects, particularly when using Terraform and GitHub Copilot.

Building This Blog with GitHub Spec Kit

Will AI fail completely, or will it actually be useful for building software going forward? I took GitHub Spec Kit for a spinn when building this blog, and the results were awesome. I have had limited experience with both Hugo and GitHub Pages before beginning, so I figured that this would be a good test case.

What is GitHub Spec Kit?

GitHub Spec Kit is a GitHub-powered workflow that emphasizes specification-first development. You define what you’re building in structured markdown documents before writing a single line of code.

Spec-Driven Development flips the script on traditional software development. For decades, code has been king — specifications were just scaffolding we built and discarded once the “real work” of coding began. Spec-Driven Development changes this: specifications become executable, directly generating working implementations rather than just guiding them.