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  • Sep 11, 2026, 12:14 AM

    One interesting thing this book points out is the different role of automation plays depending on whether you're learning or already familiar. When learning, automation is bad because you need to do it yourself. But when you know the game, automation can augment your abilities.

    HOWEVER, this is my own thought, it's also a known phenomenon that people over-rate their own expertise, especially in areas they are unfamiliar with. There is more you don't understand than you can ever imagine. So I feel like most people are likely to over-rate their abilities and automate too much, foregoing the opportunity for learning and development. This is probably especially true with AI.

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  • Sep 11, 2026, 12:28 AM

    "An important takeaway for leaders, teams, and organizations […] is that we should expect solving complex problems in software to be inherently diverse and to benefit from diverse approaches"

    Which means not just asking the average machine to churn out everything and submitting it for review...

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  • Sep 11, 2026, 1:56 AM

    @adam So as a sysadmin automation is, like, the main thing. But so much of what I do at work and home I don't automate, or only partially automate. Part of that is xkcd.com/1205/, but part of it is the importance of keeping understanding what's happening. I don't want to automate something I can't do by hand, and I don't want to forget how things work because inevitably the automation will fail at an edge case and that's the worst time to relearn how shit works.

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  • Sep 11, 2026, 2:04 AM

    @semanticist yeah the book is about software development, not sysadmin. Although sysadmin is definitely integral with software development more than ever nowadays.

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  • Sep 11, 2026, 1:58 AM

    @adam On the flip side of that, creating a working automation (by hand, obviously, none of this LLM shite) is a good way to confirm that you do actually know how shit works. If you find you can't create the automation that probably highlights a blindspot in your understanding.

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  • Sep 11, 2026, 2:06 AM

    @semanticist yeah I think creating automation is definitely different to, for example, just saying to the next person "oh just run John's ./fangle command"

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