Nothing short of regularly repeated practice prevents "forgetting how to manage a server" like the article describes, but that's not the only pitfall TFA refers to.

Besides, hiding the how does contribute a tiny little bit towards the forgetting. Not much, but still. So we keep asciinema[1] recordings of the tool performing some of the important tasks, so they can serve as a quick look-up, while the code serves as a full-detailed look-up.

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1: https://asciinema.org

Which is why I think there should still be some manually-managed servers remaining (possibly something like testing). What I didn't see mentioned is that when the automation fails for whatever reason, typically it is a five-alarm situation where minutes count. Having to search through man pages or stack exchange is wasting valuable time during one of the few situations where time is super-critical.

> Which is why I think there should still be some manually-managed servers remaining (possibly something like testing).

All operations during development are carried out manually, unless already supported by automation (and until, of course). When automating the new operations, a sysadmin must also conduct the steps manually, and also take care of considerations a developer might not have been aware of.

> What I didn't see mentioned is that when the automation fails for whatever reason, typically it is a five-alarm situation where minutes count.

Generally, this is easily-handled by redundancy, HA, and snapshot rollbacks. Of course anything that's a potential five-alarm situation has redundancy, right? :P

> What I didn't see mentioned is that when the automation fails for whatever reason, typically it is a five-alarm situation where minutes count.

No, that's not right. When automation fails, it's typically not in five-alarm situations. During five-alarm situations, knowing how to do things manually won't help, because if you could do them manually, the automation would already work.