Why Plan Review Stopped Working
DevOps.com, Thursday, September 24th, 2026
DevOps.com argues human plan review can't scale against AI-agent-driven infrastructure change volume.
The author contends that manual plan review for infrastructure changes, once effective, is breaking down under the volume of changes generated by AI agents.
Plan review actually bundles four distinct jobs -- policy compliance, blast radius assessment, intent verification, and audit documentation -- that now fail together as volume grows.
The proposed fix is to redistribute these: automate compliance checks via policy engines, replace blast radius guesswork with hard constraints like TTLs and budget caps, keep humans focused only on intent verification, and generate audit trails as a byproduct of enforcement rather than of approval.
The goal is enforcement that works without requiring anyone to read every plan.