[beat]

I'd go farther... you can have steps that literally "do nothing". They can be comments, or simple echo statements. They're placeholders to remember to write the code for that step later. This is particularly important when you need to deal with integration that isn't necessarily easy - handling auth credential safely, making sure it works in your pipeline, etc.

But all this gets back to something I used to say a lot, and the more refined version I say now. I used to say "Have humans do what humans do well; have computers do what computers do well". The key part of that was the idea that computers can't do what humans do. Now, I say "Anything a computer can do well, a human cannot do well". Which includes those pesky twenty step manual processes.

[dkarp]

But these steps already do nothing except say echo what should be done. How does that differ from your "literally do nothing" steps?

[winkeltripel]

my hot take is that it differs is that you plan to never automate some of the steps, if they're steps for a human to do. As part of onboarding, you might send out an email introducing this new human. The "description" field of this new human should be written by a person, not scraped from their linkedin or google, and summarized to less than 100 words by a computer.

[beat]

In a truly minimal system, there isn't even a prompt. A code comment is about as minimal as I know how to get. That's just a placeholder to remember to automate a step.

When automating a complex manual process, the first thing I do is write comments describing the sequence, and any parameters needed. Parameters in particular can be enlightening, because when manual processes grow organically, naming consistency becomes a source of suffering - humans can just sort of figure out the right thing to type, computers can't intuit these things and they must be made explicit. It's worse when it can't be explicit without updating the process or creating some sort of data store for mapping.

This is why naming things is one of the two hard problems in computer science.

[cyphar]

Printing means you can run the script as-is, and any bits which aren't done automatically are prompted for. Just putting comments describing the steps would be like writing a README except in a more esoteric format and would defeat the primary benefit of the approach outlined in TFA.

[beat]

It kind of boggles me that a real analysis of the problems with naming conventions in manual process got massively downvoted. But no one ever got rich counting on the analytical sophistication of HN.

I'm not saying the original approach is bad. I'm saying it's not the simplest thing that can possibly work. I'm talking about how to move to automation, not how to reduce errors on the manual process. Both are needed.