Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)
So naturally, my knee-jerk reaction is to create some kind of checklist language and interpreter. Which is almost wrong, of course.<p>I say "almost", because it occurs to me that many steps are shared individually across many different workflows. If you see a single task as an automation target, then you end up writing simple scripts that perform very focused operations -- a strong advantage over a large complicated script that does many different things, some that are repeated for other complicated scripts.<p>In this setup, you end up with checklists that remain forever, with automation replacing some or all of the print commands.<p>Of course, my spidey sense tells me that I've just pushed the problem down a level, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.