Simon TathamMar 17

When to automate a repetitive task:

NO-BRAINER: "This is obviously going to be faster to automate than to do it by hand _even once_. Let's automate it right now, and not do it by hand at all."

FORESIGHTED: "Doing it once by hand is faster than automating it, but I'm going to have to do it a lot of times, so it still saves time to automate it first."

NEED A RUN-UP: "I don't yet understand this task well enough to automate it, so I'll do it a few times by hand first to get the idea."

RAN OFF THE RUNWAY: "Great, now I've done this by hand a few times, I think I can automate it reliably! Oh, oops, turned out I only had one more case of it left to do."

TERRIFIED OF RUNNING OFF THE RUNWAY: "This is a one-off, so it would be a waste of time to automate it, I'll just do it manually."
[next day] "Oh, oops, I made a mistake and have to do it again. But it should be fine this time."
[a month later] "Even though I've had to redo it 25 times already, surely _this_ is the last time? So it would still be a waste of time to automate it."

Show threadTanebMar 17
@simontatham and it can be really hard to tell the last three cases apart when you're in them
Show threadgeraldew

@Taneb @simontatham quite true but I can say I've had multiple "ran off the runway" cases where I coded a good solution and then had another instance crop up ten or fifteen years later.

So now I still default to making something once I feel I understand the problem-solution pair - even though I definitely won't be doing the work in ten years time.

Mar 17 at 12:31pmWeb