There is a great article called "Manual Work is a Bug: Always be Automating" [0] that was written in the pre LLM era for technical operations teams. I would argue that it is just as relevant today as it was then.
To summarize:
- start making a list of the manual tasks you do
- if those tasks involve running command line tools, add an item with the commands you run
- if they are manual tasks, add those too
- over time, keep automating one portion of the list at a time e.g. the commands can become a script, the manual tasks can become tickets to another team to automate etc
At the end of the above process you have a series of automated steps that become a system instead of a bunch of items in someone's head.
In my mind, the only thing that changed with LLMs is that it's faster to create the scripts and some of the manual tasks can be done by the LLM until you get a script to do that too.
We invented code to help do "mechanical" tasks over and over again in the same way. Why replace that with agentic systems??
P.S. This is also why the whole "just commit the prompt, bro" is such utter hogwash
Like all advice, A.B.A. some pretty serious flaws if you apply it too universally. Automated solutions tend not to replacing manual work perfectly or completely. They do most of the same things, and the distinction tends to be forgotten. Maybe a human goes in and fixes things for a bit afterward, but that doesn't last. Eventually the accessible 90% is declared good enough and people forget that the rest is even possible.
The first case of large scale automation demonstrates this very well. Medieval manuscripts looked like this [0]. You can see the imperfections, but it's still a beautiful book. Gutenberg bibles omitted the scribe in favor of automated printing, but humans remained involved with the creative details in illumination and rubrication. The result is genuinely beautiful [1]. The works that were printed a century later rarely featured this kind of post-print human involvement [2]. This is still better than most of what's printed today, but it's a clear step down.
Now, there's a reasonable argument to be made that the quality differences don't matter for books and certainly don't outweigh the cost advantages. But imagine someone at your passport office has taken A.B.A. to heart and automated 90% of the job. Over time, the organization will stop handling all the edge cases and. But the edge cases didn't stop happening, they're just no longer visible. Beyond a certain scale (e.g. Google and other FAANGs), those inevitable failures manifest as seemingly capricious behavior that makes everyone hate your system and produces outcomes no human involved actually wants.
To summarize:
- start making a list of the manual tasks you do
- if those tasks involve running command line tools, add an item with the commands you run
- if they are manual tasks, add those too
- over time, keep automating one portion of the list at a time e.g. the commands can become a script, the manual tasks can become tickets to another team to automate etc
At the end of the above process you have a series of automated steps that become a system instead of a bunch of items in someone's head.
In my mind, the only thing that changed with LLMs is that it's faster to create the scripts and some of the manual tasks can be done by the LLM until you get a script to do that too.
We invented code to help do "mechanical" tasks over and over again in the same way. Why replace that with agentic systems??
P.S. This is also why the whole "just commit the prompt, bro" is such utter hogwash
0 - https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520