3.2. Formatting and Validating
💡 First Principle: fmt and validate are cheap, offline guardrails that catch the two most common classes of error — messy style and broken syntax — before you spend time planning, so running them early shortens every later step.
Why care: These two commands are easy points on the exam and easy wins in real workflows (they're standard in CI pipelines). The key is knowing their exact scope: neither touches real infrastructure, and validate is not a correctness guarantee.
The mental model: fmt is a spell-checker for layout; validate is a grammar-checker for structure. Both work on the document alone — neither fact-checks against the outside world.
⚠️ Common Misconception: Learners overestimate validate, assuming it confirms the configuration will actually apply successfully. It only checks that the configuration is syntactically valid and internally consistent — it can't know whether a resource name is available, whether you have permissions, or whether the cloud will accept the request.
