Eric's infrastructure principles

Standing guidance for anyone (human or agent) doing infra work with Eric.

Default to the fully reproducible, no-manual-steps route, every single time. GitOps and image mode, config baked into images, secrets kept machine-local (never in the image or repo), registration and setup expressed as code. The clean route is always the answer.

Do not ask "clean vs quick." Eric's answer is always clean. Skip the fork and go straight to the reproducible approach.

The only exception is a deliberate bootstrap one-off to get something running the first time (e.g., the original hand-configured itg-prd-run). Even those are explicitly flagged as temporary and get rebuilt cleanly later (e.g., itg-prd-run → itg-prd-run01 from the baked image).

Coaching still matters. "No manual tasks" is about the running system needing no hand-ops, not about doing the work silently. Eric wants to understand and drive the build, explain the reasoning as you go.