A short list of properties that make infrastructure safe to hand off, to a new engineer or to an AI agent, so the judgment stays with a human and the rest is safe to delegate. Open a property to read it in full.
I Honor the lower layer
A stranger reads the source and predicts the Kubernetes manifest or CloudFormation stack from the text alone, before anything runs.
II The same check, left of the commit
The check that draws a red squiggle for a human hands the same diagnostic to an agent, at the keystroke instead of after the commit.
III Documentation is Law
The reason the database lives in that region exists as text, because a newcomer, human or agent, has no other way in.
IV One path to prod
Every change arrives as a diff in one place where someone can say no, and a change clicked into a console arrives nowhere.
V Named secrets, least privilege
An agent holds named credentials scoped to the task, revocable in one step the day something goes wrong.
VI Bounded blast radius
A cap on scope, rate, or environment keeps the worst mistake the size of one namespace rather than the whole account.
VII Reversible before risky
A reversible change runs on its own, and dropping a table or deleting a bucket waits for a human.
VIII Escalate the judgment
A privileged change waits for approval before it lands, and an agent unsure of its authority stops and asks.
IX Attributable
Every change records who made it, what changed, and who approved it, whether the author was an engineer or an agent.
X Secret rotation is cheap
Secrets that take effort to rotate end up stale and still in use, or shared.
XI The live system is the truth
A tool that hosts its own state file signs someone up to reconcile it, and a snapshot kept only as a diff baseline is allowed to go stale.
XII Adopt in place
Existing infrastructure comes under management a slice at a time, kept in the platform's own format, with one native command to back out.
XIII Manage only what you declare
The tool changes only declared fields and deletes only what carries its ownership marker, so an omission is never a purge.
XIV Verify the artifact
The artifact carries provenance and a signature, and the check that admits it runs before apply and fails closed.