[tolmasky]

Something that seemed somewhat implicit in this article, but never fully stated, is that it also increases the quality of the work, or in other words, decreases the probability of bugs and errors. Every time you do a manual process, you introduce the possibility for a lot of human error. That's where a lot of the "willingness" vs. "unwillingness" comes in (aside from just the "time" aspect, or partially as a cause of the "time" aspect). The more boring the task, the more likely you are to sleepwalk through it and not be thorough in checking things. This leads to bugs, and can either (ideally) increase the time of the task since they immediately surface and then you are "shaken awake" and have to dig around for what you mistyped, or in the worst case, go in undetected. Like everything computers do, and kind of the whole point of programming, a script can go into the task with the same "willingness" every time. That weird edge case you found when you did the task the first time when it was still interesting can get coded in and checked for. Future weird bugs can then be trivially added to the automation script vs. just noted as a "WARNING" in a README that will never get read. If there's no existing tool, then the activation energy to create that tool just to account for that weird thing that happened that one time is always beyond the "fuck it, let's just make a note" boundary. As such, it's best to just bite the bullet in the beginning. The unfortunate thing is that this is really a indictment of our workflows in general. Much of what we do is so close to programming as it is, it sucks that "putting it into a literal program" can be such a chore (and it very much is).

[lmilcin]

Another important is that automation can solve the problem of passing the knowledge (on how to do something).

This happens when the person that uses the automation no longer needs to learn how to do the task.

Teaching people is actually extremely expensive even if you forget about reliability of entire process.

People have limited ability to learn stuff. So being able to automate certain tasks not only allows people to do more in less time or do it better, it can actually allow doing more things that the person would ever be able to learn, without need of learning.

[solarmist]

Not only that, but they can use the automation (assuming it was written for others to read) to teach themselves if needed/desired.