Looping in ansible/terraform is exactly the problem. Logic and control flow in YAML/hcl is a nightmare. Plus there's no debugging! You can't set breakpoints in a yaml file or HCL.

Adding more YAML to be parsed by other YAML is just terrible at scale.

You definitely can in Ansible.

you _can_. but _should_ you?

Ansible / Terraform are great when you're declarative, but once you start adding too much logic, things get hairy.

I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between configuration and code in a CI pipeline. This is what people try to do, and it's frankly a massive waste.

The problem is the attempt to make a distinction when there cannot be one.