[mystique]

I attributed a lot of this 'effectiveness' to developers who are lazy.

There have been times when I automated things and that was because I wanted to avoid repetitive work. I have never been able to automate something I had not manually done 2-3+ times, but once I did I knew what I needed to do to avoid manual work and make the process error free for next time same operation was needed. If someone else was dictating what they needed, I would not have been able to build my tools as effectively.

To me, a good developer is a "maker", who builds tools. For us the raw material is a computer and some free time, which makes experimentation and evolution of our tools easier compared to other professions.

[erikb]

That's quite a good point. If I have to write code for someone else that I don't really understand I first do the steps manually to understand what is happening. Then it's much easier to write code for it.

It's hard to apply often though, because there are scenarios where you can do nearly nothing manually, like optimizing a logfile parser that handles hundreds of servers every day.