alt Hacker NewsThere is a great article called "Manual Work is a Bug: Always be Automating" [0] that was written in the pre LLM era for technical operations teams. I would argue that it is just as relevant today as it was then.
To summarize:
- start making a list of the manual tasks you do
- if those tasks involve running command line tools, add an item with the commands you run
- if they are manual tasks, add those too
- over time, keep automating one portion of the list at a time e.g. the commands can become a script, the manual tasks can become tickets to another team to automate etc
At the end of the above process you have a series of automated steps that become a system instead of a bunch of items in someone's head.
In my mind, the only thing that changed with LLMs is that it's faster to create the scripts and some of the manual tasks can be done by the LLM until you get a script to do that too.
We invented code to help do "mechanical" tasks over and over again in the same way. Why replace that with agentic systems??
P.S. This is also why the whole "just commit the prompt, bro" is such utter hogwash