The pull request is not the migration: define the handoff after agent-generated infrastructure

Google Cloud’s GKE agentic migration announcement draws a useful boundary around what an infrastructure agent produces. The open-source plugin translates EKS infrastructure-as-code and Kubernetes manifests, runs deterministic validations, and submits proposed GKE configurations through pull requests instead of applying them to a live cluster. The announcement also delegates stateful-data transport to separate tools and runbooks (Google Cloud).

That boundary makes the pull request valuable without making it equivalent to a completed migration. An independent review reports that the plugin does not run terraform apply or modify the source estate. It identifies stateful-data movement, application refactoring, network design, deployment validation, and cutover as operator responsibilities (Musthave.AI). These are descriptions of the announced workflow, not evidence from a production migration.

Read the pull request as a translation record

A generated pull request can place source configuration, proposed target configuration, and validation results into a familiar review surface. Within the documented scope, it can answer questions such as:

• What source artifacts were translated?
• What target artifacts were generated?
• Which deterministic validations ran?
• What changes are being proposed for review?

It does not, by itself, establish that the target infrastructure has been deployed, state has been transferred, workloads behave correctly, traffic has moved, or rollback works. Those claims refer to later stages and call for different evidence.

This distinction changes the review question. “Does the diff look plausible?” is useful, but narrower than “What migration state does this pull request establish?” The sourced answer is bounded: it establishes a proposed and validated configuration within the plugin’s documented translation workflow (Google Cloud).

The SGL handoff record

We propose attaching a compact handoff record to each agent-generated migration pull request. This is an SGL operating framework derived from the boundary described above, not a feature attributed to the plugin.

Field	What to record	Why it matters
Produced artifact	Source revision, generated target files, generator version, and pull-request commit	Fixes the review to a reproducible configuration proposal
Validation performed	Exact checks, inputs, results, and omitted checks	Prevents “validated” from silently expanding beyond the checks that ran
Authority withheld	Apply credentials, deployment approval, traffic control, data-movement authority, and rollback authority not granted to the agent	Makes the current control boundary visible
Stateful dependencies	Data stores, volumes, queues, identity state, external endpoints, and the owner of each transfer plan	Keeps configuration translation separate from state movement
Pre-cutover evidence	Deployment result, behavioral tests, data checks, network checks, observability signals, and rollback rehearsal	Defines what could justify a later cutover decision

The record is deliberately attached to the pull request rather than postponed until deployment. Reviewers can then distinguish what the artifact demonstrates from what remains an untested plan.

Preserve the withheld authority

The reported absence of terraform apply is more than an implementation detail. It locates the handoff: the agent proposes target configuration, while an operator-controlled process retains deployment authority (Musthave.AI).

A team can preserve that boundary by recording who can approve the pull request, who can apply it, which environment can receive it, and who can authorize cutover or reversal. This is a proposed control design, not a claim about Google’s implementation. The practical objective is to stop approval of generated text from being interpreted as approval of every downstream action.

The same separation applies to validation. Deterministic checks can establish that specified conditions passed for specified artifacts. They cannot establish unspecified application behavior. A handoff record therefore names each check rather than compressing them into a generic “validated” status.

State travels on a different path

Google’s announcement explicitly assigns stateful-data transport to other tools and runbooks (Google Cloud). The independent review similarly places stateful-data movement outside the agent’s reported responsibilities (Musthave.AI).

For operators, that creates a second workstream alongside configuration review. A database, persistent volume, queue, or externally managed dependency may have its own sequencing, consistency, downtime, verification, and recovery questions. The pull request can reference those plans, but its merged state does not demonstrate that they ran successfully.

One useful convention is to give every stateful dependency an owner and a named completion artifact. Depending on the system, that artifact might be a reconciliation result, a consistency check, or a recorded recovery test. These examples are proposed review patterns; the supplied sources do not report outcomes for them.

Cutover begins with new evidence

After merge, the migration case moves from proposed configuration to observed execution. A deployment record can show what was applied. Behavioral tests can show what happened in the tested environment. State checks can show whether selected data conditions held. A rollback exercise can show whether the rehearsed recovery path worked under its test conditions.

None of those artifacts alone proves that production cutover will succeed. Together, they can give the cutover owner a more explicit basis for a bounded decision. The relevant question becomes: which claims have direct evidence, which remain assumptions, and who accepts the unresolved risk?

That is the useful handoff after agent-generated infrastructure. The pull request closes the translation stage and opens a sequence of operator-owned decisions. Teams designing similar human-and-agent delivery paths can use the same separation in their broader build process: identify the artifact, name the validation, preserve withheld authority, track state separately, and gather execution evidence before changing traffic.