[skybrian]

This reads like it made things worse:

> There was an unexpected consequence: By automating the laborious parts of my work, I had, in turn, filled my day with more laborious parts.

> A menial task that took me 5 minutes once or twice a day turned into a menial task that I was doing 10-20 times a day. As I had automated the obvious parts, it left behind the glue work that never bothered me before. Now it was a substantial part of my day, and the context switching was killing me.

I assume that’s not the whole story, but I would have liked to read about the ways it made things better, too.

[eager_learner]

It seems the author left in a hurry because he had a lot of new laborious and menial tasks to attend to. :)

[devolving-dev]

He means that he's working 10 times faster so the manual things that he does once per task have to be done 10 times, and so he starts automating those too. I'm not claiming that he's actually 10x faster, just explaining.

But it kind of fits my experience too. Less time coding, and more time gathering requirements, testing, and doing knowledge transfer etc. Then you start thinking about how to make those parts automatic via automated tests or automated documentation generation that you review etc.