What is a primary benefit of running terraform plan during development?

• A. Reconciles Terraform's state against deployed resources and permanently modifies state using the current status of deployed resources
• B. Initializes your working directory containing your Terraform configuration files
• C. Validates your expectations against the execution plan without permanently modifying state
• D. Formats your Terraform configuration files

Answer: (C)

The main idea being tested is that running Terraform plan lets you preview changes without applying them. Plan compares the configuration you’ve written with the current Terraform state to determine what would change if you ran apply. It outputs an execution plan that shows which resources would be created, updated, or destroyed and what values would be used, but it does not modify any real resources or the state. This makes it invaluable during development because you can verify that the changes you expect will happen, catch drift between the config and the real world, and confirm variables and dependencies behave as intended. If needed, you can save the plan to a file with -out and apply it later, giving you a safe, repeatable deployment step. The other commands do different jobs: initializing the working directory to install providers; applying would actually modify resources and state; and formatting just tidies up code and does not analyze planned changes.