aws.iam.Policy("policy",
    description="Description",
    policy = json.dumps({ ... })
)

AWS shows this as a “Customer managed” “Permission policy” but the name is “policy-8964f2d”. Pulumi add the stuff after the dash? Is there a way to prevent that? Is the info random or does it represent something?

It's random so that you can deploy different stacks into the same region/account.

Any way to change it to be something understandable? I’m working in “dev” stack so change it to something like policy-dev?

you can override it, but for policies it’s not recommended because of the eventual consistency of IAM