How I Built a Terraform Plan JSON Parser in Python

Most DevOps engineers have run terraform plan thousands of times. Very few have looked at what comes out when you add the -json flag. I spent a couple of weeks inside that JSON output while building tfdrift , an open-source drift detection tool. What I found was a surprisingly well-structured format — and a handful of gotchas that aren't documented anywhere obvious. This post is the technical deep-dive I wish I'd had when I started. If you're building any kind of tooling on top of Terraform — dr