Context: Post #9 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption.

First, a disclaimer. Before you automate something, first see whether you can just not do the thing at all. Questioning the Requirements is a step that should always happen before you gleefully systematize a task.

One reason for focusing on automation that bites harder at Lightcone than other places is that we are an organization that is trying very hard to stay small and in-sync with each other. This plays into the general point of increasing returns to effort. If you can automate a task that takes half a full-time-equivalent at a bigger organization, then that is much less valuable than automating a task that is taking up half a Lightcone team-member.

Now, automating things is great. Machines are cheap. Most of our work is the kind of stuff that can be automated with software. However, there are both a number of common traps associated with automating tasks, and a number of virtues that are particularly helpful guides for automation work.

1. It's OK to automate a part of something.

A blogpost that goes viral on hacker news from time to time is this [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.