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A comment on Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h failing to automate it.

Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by ghaff on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:04PM (#29500761)
There's also the matter of eliminating errors.

There's one script I wrote to partially automate posting podcasts. (I really should add a couple of additional steps.) It's almost certainly saved me time over time. But it also automates a fiddly process that's very easy to get something wrong if I do it by hand.

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Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by barbazoo on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:58PM (#29501431)
Do-nothing scripts are great for that too, I think this was shared here a while back

https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-...

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Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by brokenmachine on Thursday December 09, 2021 @08:31PM (#29505416)
Nice. I like that idea.
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Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by vanusa on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:13PM (#29500876)
Yeah that's the thing - about half the time I set out to automate something, I wind up in that

"Oh shit, this is taking longer than I thought -- so I'm just going to have to park it in a semi-finished state, and get back to it later. Grand, now I have two problems."

place.

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Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by loudtieblahblah on Thursday December 09, 2021 @02:11PM (#29501576)
>There's also the matter of eliminating errors.

Alternatively, you could replicate those errors at scale....

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Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by musingsole on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:39PM (#29501169)
Automation becomes a type of documentation for certain tasks. Sure, a real, human-intended document might be better, but this script contains even more details about the process and might even be able to do some of the steps for you!
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Re:Don't spend 6mins doing it by hand when you can spend 6h ... by michaelbuckbee on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:55PM (#29501376)
This is always the big thing to me - the crisp repeatability of an automated process often functions as it's own kind of executable documentation.
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