When Automation Creates More Work Than It Saves
Automation fails quietly when it encodes yesterday’s exceptions as today’s defaults. Teams inherit brittle wrappers, undocumented flags, and pipelines that only one person can restart.
Before we write a new tool, we ask three questions: How often does this task happen? How costly is a mistake? Who will own the failure mode six months from now? If the answers are fuzzy, we document the manual path first.
Useful automation reduces cognitive load without hiding responsibility. That usually means fewer clever abstractions and more boring, observable steps — with clear exit codes, logs you can grep, and a human-readable README that explains the why.