A hand-run command leaves no record of why.

IaC turns an infrastructure change into a reviewed, versioned pull request instead of an unreviewable click.

Manual command

No record of intent

Can't be reproduced on demand

No review before it changed

Gone if the project is deleted

IaC config in Git

Pull-request review before apply

Reproducible from a clean state

Auditable, versioned history

Recreates identically, every time

Meridian's own gap: environment projects from the Foundations course were bootstrapped by hand — accurate today, with zero record of WHY prod's IP policy is stricter than dev's, and no way to recreate it for a fourth environment.